Therapeutic Cultures
About the Book Series
This interdisciplinary series explores the role which therapeutic discourses and practices play in the organisation of social life, critically addressing the two broad questions of how therapeutic knowledge is popularised beyond academia and mental health care, and how it participates in popular culture, and in institutional structures and processes in government, law, education, media, health, work, family life, public and private policies. Therapeutic Cultures seeks to address the histories of therapeutic culture and engage with its contemporary manifestations, so welcomes books that examine the transnationalisation of therapeutic discourses and practices and their uses in local institutional settings, as well as studies of the ways in which therapeutic discourses and practices participate in the social organisation of power, and how they become ingrained across a wide array of institutions.
The Therapeutic Afterlife: Spirituality and the New Sacred
1st Edition
By Heidi Marie Rimke
February 26, 2026
The Therapeutic Afterlife: Spirituality and the New Sacred provides a compelling and original analysis of how contemporary self-help literature is transforming our ideas about God, the soul, and life after death. As more people identify as “spiritual but not religious,” these concepts—once grounded...
The Dai and the Indigenous: Notes on the Appearance and Disappearance of a Figure in the Therapeutics of a Nation
1st Edition
By Asha Achuthan
January 30, 2026
This is a book about the dai, or traditional birth practitioner, and her place in the emerging therapeutic domain in colonial and contemporary India. The book employs a caste-informed feminist reading of the colonial archive against the grain and explores papers by Englishwomen physicians, ...
Mental Health and Otherness: Intersections between Gender, Race, Class and Age
1st Edition
By Ilana Mountian
December 23, 2024
Based on two decades of research in Brazil and the UK, this book explores the ways in which intersections of gender, race and class affect the positioning of the subject as 'Other' in discourses of health, and how the positioning of the subject as 'Other' has implications for health research and ...
Beyond Therapeutic Culture in Latin America: Hybrid Networks in Argentina and Brazil
1st Edition
By Piroska Csúri, Mariano Ben Plotkin, Nicolás Viotti
May 27, 2024
By focusing on quantitative and qualitative research in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, this book expands on the notion of "therapeutic culture." Usually considered a global phenomenon disseminated from North to South, and associated to "modern" forms of "psychologized" subjectivity, "...
Assembling Therapeutics: Cultures, Politics and Materiality
1st Edition
Edited
By Suvi Salmenniemi, Johanna Nurmi, Inna Perheentupa, Harley Bergroth
March 31, 2021
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351233392, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.This volume examines the ways in which people engage with therapeutic practices, such as ...
Therapeutic Worlds: Popular Psychology and the Sociocultural Organisation of Intimate Life
1st Edition
By Daniel Nehring, Dylan Kerrigan
September 30, 2020
This book builds a fresh perspective on therapeutic narratives of intimate life. Focusing on the question of how popular psychology organises everyday experiences of intimacy, its argument is grounded in qualitative research in Trinidad in the Anglophone Caribbean. Against the backdrop of Trinidad’...
The Psychologization of Society: On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway
1st Edition
By Ole Jacob Madsen
November 28, 2019
The Psychologization of Society explores the manner in which psychology has increasingly crept into everyday life, with nature reduced to a source of mental health, the belief in God motivated by health not salvation, sin and evil turned into psychiatric diagnosis and the market economy being ...