Examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. This book examines a range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma. Acknowledgments ix 1. Introduction Cultural Sociology and the Therapeutic 8 Therapy as a New Emotional Style 12 Texts and Contexts 16 Cultural Critique and Psychology 19 2. Freud: A Cultural Innovator 22 Psychoanalysis as a Charismatic Enterprise 24 The Social Organization of Freudian Charisma 26 Freud in America 29 The Freudian Cultural Matrix 35 The Romance of Psychology and Popular Culture 51 Conclusion 56 3. From Homo economicus to Homo communicans 58 Emotional Control in the Sociology of Organizations 61 The Power of Control and the Control of Power 64 Psychologists Enter the Market 66 A New Emotional Style 72 Emotional Control 75 The Communicative Ethic as the Spirit of the Corporation 88 Emotional, Moral, and Professional Competence 95 Conclusion 103 4. The Tyranny of Intimacy 105 Intimacy: An Increasingly Cold Haven 107 Beyond Their Will? Psychologists and Marriage 115 What Feminism and Psychology Have in Common 120 Intimacy: A New Emotional imagination 125 Communicative Rationality in the Bedroom 131 Toward the Ideology of Pure Emotion 135 The Cooling of Passion 142 Conclusion 149 5. Triumphant Suffering 152 Why Therapy Triumphed 156 The Therapeutic Narrative of Selfhood 171 Performing the Self through Therapy 178 A Narrative in Action 186 Conclusion 196 6. A New Emotional Stratification? 197 The Rise of Emotional Competence 200 Emotional Intelligence and Its Antecedents 202 The Global Therapeutic Habitus and the New Man 217 Intimacy as a Social Good 222 Conclusion 235 7. Conclusion: Institutional Pragmatism in the Study of Culture 238 Notes 249 Index 287