Happiness and the capture of subjectivity. (1st October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Atkinson, Paul
• Is Part Of: Self and society. Volume 44:Number 4(2016)
• Page Start: 394
• Page End: 401
• Publication Date: 2016-10-01
• Subjects: happiness -- capitalism -- CBT -- neoliberalism -- subjectivity; Human potential movement -- Periodicals; Humanistic psychology -- Periodicals; Self-realization (Psychology) -- Periodicals; Human potential movement; Humanistic psychology; Periodicals; 150.198605
• DOI: 10.1080/03060497.2015.1010296
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0306-0497

Abstract

Abstract : The happiness movement is part of a growing trend in developed capitalist societies of separating the experience of suffering and anxiety from its socio-economic context. In their recent book, Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies, Layard and Clark emphasise the genetic roots of depression and anxiety, which they want to characterise as the mental ill-health of the individual, the primary source of unhappiness and a scandal of unrecognised and untreated disease burden in the UK. The author argues that taken out of context, happiness is a facile concept that is invalid as a common good and a goal of political policy. Far more familiar in modern capitalist societies is the marketing of happiness as the ever-elusive reward of continuous consumption. Separating the subjectivity of individual suffering from the social complexities of lived experience exposes us to new possibilities of neoliberal ideological capture – social management through the marketisation of suffering as consumer demand serviced by an industry of happiness and positive-thinking providers.