Happiness Studies and Wellbeing: A Lacanian Critique of Contemporary Conceptualisations of the Cure
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3384/cu.2000.1525.146791Keywords:
Happiness studies, wellbeing, self-help, positive psychology, biopolitics psychoa-nalysis, Jacques LacanAbstract
Criticising the discourse of happiness and wellbeing from a psychoanalytic perspective, this article is in five parts. The first offers a brief philosophical genealogy of happiness, charting its diverse meanings from ancient Greece, through Medieval Scholasticism and on to bourgeois liberalism, utilitarianism and neoliberalism. The second contextualizes contemporary happiness in the wider milieu of self-help culture and positive psychology. The third explores the growing influence but also methodological weaknesses of the field of Happiness Studies. The fourth then focuses specifically on the notion of wellbeing and the impact it has had on changing definitions of health itself, particularly mental health. The fifth and final section then turns to psychoanalysis, its Lacanian orientation especially, to explore the critical resources it offers to counter today’s dominant therapeutic cultures. It also emphasises psychoanalytic clinical practice as itself an ethico-political challenge to the injunction to be happy that lies at the heart of consumer culture.
References
Aristotle (2006): Nicomachean Ethics [Trans. C. C. W. Taylor], Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bentham, Jeremy (1776/1988): A Fragment on Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139163675
Bentham, Jeremy (1780/1970): An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London: Athlone Press.
Berlant, Lauren (2011): Cruel Optimism, London: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394716
Bok, Derek (2010): The Politics of Happiness: What Government can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being, Oxford: Princeton University Press.
China, Jacques (2006): ‘Psychoanalysis and State Regulation: A Conference Report on the International Conference Organized by the College of Psychoanalysts – UK’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 11, 323-329. DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100087
Cottingham, John (1998): Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511612237
Diener, Ed, Daniel Kahneman & John Helliwell (eds) (2010): International Differences in Wellbeing,New York: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199732739.001.0001
Ehernreich, Barbara (2010): Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & the World, London: Granta books.
Foucault, Michel (1975/1995): Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [Trans. Alan Sheridan], London: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel (1997): Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth [Trans. Robert Hurley], London: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel (1976/1988): The History of Sexuality Volume 1 [Trans. Robert Hurley,], London: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel (1983/2010): The Birth of the Clinic [Trans. Alan Sheridan], London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel (1997/2003): Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76 [Trans. David Macey], London: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel (2004/2008): The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 [Trans. Graham Burchell], Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freud, Sigmund (1963/1970): Therapy and Technique [Trans. James Strachey], New York: Collier Books.
Freud, Sigmund (1930/2002): Civilization and its Discontents [Trans. David McLintock], London: Penguin.
Freud, Sigmund (1920/2003): Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings [Trans. John Reddick], London: Penguin.
Freud, Sigmund & Joseph Breuer (1895/1991): Studies on Hysteria [Trans. James and Alix Strachey], London: Penguin.
Hagerty, Michael & Ruut Veenhoven (2003): ‘Wealth and Happiness Re-visited: Growing Wealth of Nations Does Go With Greater Happiness’, Social Indicators Research, 64:1, 1-27. DOI: 10.1023/A:1024790530822
Haidt, Jonathan (2006): The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, London: Arrow Books.
Halberstam, Judith (2011): The Queer Art of Failure, London: Duke University Press. DOI: 10.1215/9780822394358
James, Oliver (2007): Affluenza, Reading: Vermillion.
Harvey, David (2000): Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Illouz, Eva (2008): Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help, Berkley: University of California Press.
Kamer, Adam (2010): ‘An Unobtrustive Behavioural Model of Gross National Happiness’, CHI ’10: Proceedings of the SGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, New York: ACM: 287-290.
Lacan, Jacques (1986/1997): Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis [Trans. Denis Porter], London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, Jacques (2004): Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre X: L’angoisse, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques (2005): Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le Sinthome, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Lacan, Jacques (2006): Écrits [Trans. Bruce Fink], London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Leader, Darian (2009): The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, London: Penguin.
Leader, Darian (2012): What is Madness?, London: Penguin.
Mackay, Harvey (2004): We Got Fired! … And It’s the Best Things that Ever Happened to Us, New York: Balantine Books.
Malone, Kareen (2006): ‘Regulation and Standards for Psychoanalysis: The Place of the Other in Psychoanalysis and its Teachings’, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Counselling & Health, 8:3, 269-284. DOI: 10.1080/13642530600878253
McMahon, Darrin (2006): Happiness: A History, New York: Gove Press.
Mitchell, Byron Katie (2002): Loving What Is: Four Questions that Can Change Your Life, Kent: Rider.
Miller, Jacques-Alain (2005): ‘The Response of Psychoanalysis to Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy’, Lacanian Praxis, 2, 38-41.
Morel, Geneviéve (2011): Sexual Ambiguities: Sexuation and Psychosis [Trans. Lyndsay Watson], London: Karnac.
Neocleous, Mark (2013): ‘Resisting Resilience’, Radical Philosophy, 178, 2-7.
Pryce-Jones, Jessica (2010): Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI: 10.1002/9780470666845
Seligman, Martin (2003): Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Seligman, Martin (2006): Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind and Your Life, New York: Vintage Books.
Seligman, Martin (2011): Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being – And How to Achieve Them, London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Soler, Colette (2010): L’affecte Lacanien, Paris: Ulf.
Tilmouth, Christopher (2008): Passion’s Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Verhaeghe, Paul (2008): On Being Normal and Other Disorders: A Manual for Clinical Psychodiagnostics, London: Karnac Books Ltd.
Wurtzel, Elizabeth (1996): Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, London: Quartet.
Žižek, Slavoj (2009): The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2014 Wright
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Copyright for all manuscripts rests with the author(s). The editors reserve the right to edit manuscripts. Contributors are responsible for acquiring all permissions from the copyright owners for the use of quotations, illustrations, tables, etc. Each author must, before final publication fill, in a publishing agreement provided by LiU E-Press.
Since 2021 Culture Unbound uses a Creative Commons: Attribution license for new articles, which allows users to distribute the work and to reform or build upon it without the author's permission. Full reference to the author must be given. For older articles please see each article landing page.
