Constructing the Self, Constructing America Quotes

“Notice that I am treating psychotherapy as a cultural artifact that can be interpreted, rather than as a universal healing technology that has already brought a transcendent "cure" to earthlings. As a matter of fact, nothing has cured the human race, and nothing is about to. Mental ills don't work that way; they are not universal, they are local. Every era has a particular configuration of self, illness, healer, technology; they are a kind of cultural package. They are interrelated, intertwined, inter­penetrating. So when we study a particular illness, we are also studying the conditions that shape and define that illness, and the sociopolitical impact of those who are responsible for healing it.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“This taken-for-granted understanding about what it means to be human-- that one must be fixed, adjusted, remade, or healed-- seems to be so central an aspect of the postwar clearing that it is never really noticed, let alone challenged...Consumers 'know' without being told or convinced, that they are not adequate as they are. They appear to be fully aware that they are inadequate, unattractive, incomplete or inconsequential and must be transformed into different people in order to be happy, loved, and fulfilled.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“He accepted without question the notion that there is such a thing as 'normal,' that most people have attained it, and that it could be achieved by his patients if only they would have a successful therapy.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“The self is configured in ways that both reflect and influence the very foundations of social life and everyday living. Without the guidance set by a particular set of ideas about what it means to be human, political conflict would be impossible. The shape of the self in a particular era indicates which goals individuals are supposed to strive toward, and how individuals are to comport themselves while striving; it indicates what is worthwhile, who is worthwhile, and which institutions determine worthwhileness. In other words, the self emerges out of a moral dialogue that sets the stage for all other political struggles. Once the self is set, the rest of the struggles begin to appear in the clearing: they materialize.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“In the West, there have been many pre-twentieth century configurations of the self...Each of these selves are part of the heritage of the West. Each of these selves, all sure that they were the one, proper way of being human, all sure that their way of arranging power relations of gender, race, community and age was the one natural arrangement, all sure that their God was the only true God, are the antecedents of our current self. It is a humbling, disorienting vision.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes societies and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“The self embodies what the culture believes is humankind's place in the cosmos-- its limits, talents, expectations and prohibitions... There is no universal, trans-historical self, only local selves; there is no universal theory about the self, only local theories.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“The message is constantly displayed on television commercials, where the motive of keeping up with (rather than cooperating with) the Jonses is treated as an unquestioned value.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“In the post-World War II era in the United States the shape of the cultural landscape has configured the self of the middle and upper classes into a particular kind of masterful, bounded self: the empty self. By this I mean a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning—a self that experiences these social absences and their consequences “interiorly” as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger. It is this undifferentiated hunger that has provided the motivation for the mindless, wasteful consumerism of the late twentieth century. The post-World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost, and unknowingly it fuels the new consumer-orientated economy: the self is empty, and it strives, desperately, to be filled up.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy

“Vast historical changes in the last 500 years in the West have slowly created a world in which the individual is commonly understood to be a container of a 'mind' and more recently a 'self' that needs to be 'therapied,' rather than, say, a carrier of a divine soul that needs to be saved, or simply an element of the communal unit that must cooperate for the common good.”
― Philip Cushman, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History Of Psychotherapy