Day 32 and 33 – Neoliberalism and the commodification of “therapy”
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| Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash |
This post will likely be a bit clumsy because I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I’ve been reading, but I will try to take it one step at a time.
Bazzano (2016b) defines neo-liberalism this way.
At times described as the most successful creed in world history, neoliberalism is both ubiquitous and invisible, everywhere and nowhere. It is the ideology of late capitalism, and came into existence in the 1980s, in the Thatcher/Reagan era. It has been variously characterised (sic) as the commodification of, and an intrusion into, our everyday life. The expression '24/7' began to circulate around that time, glamorising (sic) productivity and conspicuous consumption for their own sake, and slowly redefining the individual as a 'full-time economic agent.’
The effect of neoliberalism on counselling and psychotherapy can be described as an effort to commodify human experience by a series of strategies introduced to the public sector, and specifically to the NHS. They include New Public Management, evidence-based practice, managed care, the ascendancy of the randomised (sic) controlled trial, and 'managerialism'. All of these seek to turn healing of any kind - whether of broken bodies or minds; living practices dealing with living subjects - into a commodity. Neoliberalism regards individuals as isolated units whose feelings, thoughts and ways of being in the world it pathologises (sic) as dysfunctional if they are unproductive, undesirable or of no use to the needs of the market.
This definition immediately reminded me of two of the ten principles of Disability Justice as described by Piepzna-Samarasinha’s (2018).
3. ANTI-CAPITALIST POLITIC. We are anti-capitalist, as the very nature of our mind/bodies often resists conforming to a capitalist “normative” level of production. We don’t believe human worth is dependent on what and how much a person can produce. We critique a concept of “labor” as defined by able-bodied supremacy, white supremacy, and gender normativity. We understand capitalism to be a system that promotes private wealth accumulation for some at the expense of others.
5. RECOGNIZING WHOLENESS. We value our people as they are, for who they are, and understand that people have inherent worth outside of capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience. Each person has an internal experience composed of their own thoughts, sensations, emotions, sexual fantasies, perceptions, and idiosyncrasies. Disabled people are whole people. (p. 27)
By way of example, Bazzano (2016b) criticizes psychotherapy and positive psychology’s embrace of the notion of “resilience.” He says,
…the social and political emphasis on resilience exacerbates the pressure on the individual to be resilient, forgetting the fundamental need to acknowledge and attend to the sense of vulnerability brought about by a crisis. With closer scrutiny, this aggressive marketing of resilience does not appear wholly dissimilar from the injunction to 'toughen up' heard from our fathers by sons of my generation. It is as if all the progress earned by 70 years of psychotherapy has been regressed to a single reductive formula.
What's more, our very humanity is denied by neoliberal ideology. Low moods, fragility, sadness, vulnerability are disdained because they slow a person down, which means she is able to shop/consume less. To pause and reflect on one's experience is seen as idleness. To quietly rejoice in the pleasure of living is to be unpractical.
Bazzano (2016b) goes on to describe neoliberalism’s effect on psychotherapy. The involvement of the US Department of Defense in psychology’s development of research and practice, and the market’s desire for productivity have left “psychology and psychotherapy obedient to neoliberal ideology (which) is no longer organismic; it is no longer interested in describing the fluctuations of an organism in search of actualisation, (sic) meaning and freedom.”
The desire to scientifically measure and quantify all things human or to distrust it has plagued psychological research. Take empathy as an example. Bazanno (2016b) describes psychology’s potential desire to quantify and measure things like “empathy” as a means of reaching policy makers as a ubiquitous and disquieting prevalence of reach of neoliberal thought.
It has a feel of 'objectivity' in its pragmatic disregard for the messy aspects of being human - our feelings, emotions and unconscious motivations. But it relies heavily on a specific worldview that sees all these aspects of the human condition as a hindrance to productivity and efficiency. The neoliberal perspective sees the psyche as a territory to be scanned, mapped, colonised (sic) and harnessed to the productivity machine.
I’m sure there is more to say here… but for now I’m sitting with these ideas about neoliberalism and psychotherapy – and thinking about the long reach of these in the development of the profession of expressive arts therapy and mental health counseling.
Bazzano, M. (2016a). The conservative turn in person-centered therapy. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 15(4), 339–355.
https://doi-org.ezproxyles.flo.org/10.1080/14779757.2016.1228540
Bazzano, M. (2016b). Healing and resilience. Therapy Today, 27(10), 18–21.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press. Kindle Edition.
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