Self-Help in the 1990s: The Management of the Self in the Clinton Era

In the 1990s, there was a presumption that the election of Bill Clinton marked a new kind of politics, one marked in part by the heightened visibility of therapeutic language and concepts in political discourse. This thesis questions that presumption by placing trends in the mainstream of self-help (as articulated directly in books and television talk-shows and indirectly in Hollywood cinema) alongside the policy agenda of successive administrations. A comparison of the Clinton era and the preceding Reagan-Bush era does indeed reveal parallels between the dominant strains of therapeutic culture and the dominant politics of each era. Some have sought to explain these parallels by arguing that therapeutic culture displaces traditional forms of legitimisation in the political system. Such an argument suggests that the therapeutic ethos succeeds where “traditional” institutions of all kinds (mainstream religion, the family, the law) are in a post-1960s state of decline. Others find that the influence works in the other direction: that the ethos of personal responsibility within contemporary self-help reflects the growing strength of neoliberalism as practiced by the state since the late 1970s. Neoliberalism here appears not just as an economic agenda but as a wholesale displacement of the social as an organising principle within people's lives - explaining away structural inequalities as the result of individual success and failure. In this argument, neoliberal policies under Clinton may differ in inflection but are essentially continuous with those under Reagan and Bush Snr.  By contrast, this thesis argues that the prominence of therapeutic culture in the 1990s represents neither the decline of the social nor the rise of individualism. Following Nikolas Rose and the Foucauldian model of governmentality he uses, I argue that, on the contrary, there was, in the Clinton era, a deep concern both for the therapeutic healing of the self and for the reparation of the social fabric in the midst of a supposed “culture war.” However, the subject and object of that reconciliation differ in kind from that of the Reagan era. While Reagan-era neoliberalism associates freedom with the creation of markets in which rational, choice-making individuals can succeed on their own terms, the centrist politics of the Third Way under Clinton presupposes a world in which partnership not competition is the basis for a new ethical citizen-subject. A close reading of both eighties’ Recovery literature and nineties’ New Age literature shows that while the opposing themes of freedom and responsibility are foregrounded in both eras, the context, rationale and ultimately the meaning of these themes is distinct because they address two different kinds of subjectivity. Similarly, while the actual policies of the Clinton era may resemble those of the Reagan era, the rhetorical terrain of government had shifted: from the market unleashed to the community empowered. I argue that an analysis which seeks not to separate but align the personal and political provides the basis for more nuanced cultural history of both therapeutic culture and contemporary American politics.