Published: 2 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
More people are seeking the answer to life’s big questions in therapy, but TARA ISABELLA BURTON argues self-care can’t replace the shared cultural narrative of religion.
Historically, the project of making sense of our lives was often dominated by religion. Our churches, our synagogues, our mosques offered answers to life’s most wrenching questions: Why do we suffer? What is my purpose in life? Why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over?
But religious institutions don’t have the cachet, or public trust, that they once did. For some, the language and worldview of therapy fills that gap.
We have withdrawn to a highly subjectivist form of individualism,” said Eva Illouz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. “This means that our emotions have become the moral ground for our actions.”
Yet it is precisely that rejection of our communal lives that makes therapy culture — at least the version of it on social media and in wellness advertisements — such an imperfect substitute.
The idea that we are “authentic” only insofar as we cut ourselves off from one another, that the truest or most fundamental parts of our humanity can be found in our desires and not our obligations, risks cutting us off from one of the most important truths about being human: We are social animals. And while the call to cut off the “toxic” or to pursue the mantra of “live your best life,” or “you are enough” may well serve some of us in individual cases, the normalisation of narratives of personal liberation threaten to further weaken our already frayed social bonds.
It turns out that we may not be enough — at least not on our own. We need a shared cultural narrative that reflects that fact.
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Image: The Scream, Edvard Munch (detail, Creative Commons)
