Popular psychology and the colonisation of intimate life in Trinidad

Therapeutic politics reconsidered: Power, post-colonialism and the psychologisation of society in the Global South

“…This thematic coincidence results, we suggest, from the way in which specialist psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge has been popularised, as a moral grammar for the conduct of self and everyday social relationships, and for the conceptualisation and resolution of institutional problems. As we have argued elsewhere (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019), psychological knowledge and its clinical and therapeutic applications operate within and are defined by socio-historically specific structures of knowledge and power. In this sense, Kenneth Gergen (1973) suggests that social psychology is substantially concerned with the explanation of historically contingent forms of psychological life.…”

“…Our fieldwork in Trinidad involved participant information, the collection of documentary sources on local therapeutic culture, the gathering and analysis of historical and contemporary photography, as well as semi-structured interviews with consumers of popular psychological products and services (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019). Designing and carrying out our research, we drew on established frameworks for the conduct of observational and interview research and the analysis of narrative data.…”

“…In the following, we analyse the socio-historical formation of therapeutic institutions in Trinidad, their role in strategies of social control during the island’s British colonial (1802–1962) and post-independence (since 1962) periods, and Trinidadians’ contemporary uses of popular therapeutic discourses and practices in making sense of their everyday experiences. Our historical analysis is grounded in a synthesis of extant research, while the contemporary part of our analysis draws on multi-methods qualitative research on everyday therapeutic engagements among middle-class Trinidadians concluded in 2017 (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019).…”

“…In turn, much of the literature on psychologisation, beginning with Christopher Lasch’s (1991 [1979]) influential The Culture of Narcissism , has been critical of its social, cultural, and political consequences. Across diverse theoretical perspectives, most notably those of Foucauldian discourse analysis, Critical Theory, Post-Marxism, and Critical Psychology, scholars have long tended to associate therapeutic culture with the privatisation and individualisation of social problems, and with the promotion of a cognitive and emotional solipsism that is closely bound up with the deconstruction of collective ties and modes of political association (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019).…”

“…Our second aim considers how Trinidadians today may draw on psychotherapeutic discourses to make sense of their everyday lives, pursue personal development, and, in so doing, construct specific modes of political (dis-)engagement. To address this objective, we draw on qualitative research on understandings and experiences of couple relationships among middle-class, female consumers of popular psychology (Nehring and Kerrigan, 2019). Couple relationships are important for an analysis of the interrelationship between politics and gender, in so far as they are a central site in which gendered relationships of power are played out and the personal encounters the political in contemporary Trinidad (Barrow, 1996).…”