Jim Endersby. A Guinea Pig's History of Biology: The Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 499 pp. $27.95 (softcover). ISBN 978-0-674-02713-8

✍ Scribed by Jane Jenkins

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 115 KB
• Volume: 45
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.20353

✦ Synopsis

In Saving the Modern Soul, sociologist Eva Illouz attempts to explain how and why psychological approaches to the self have become so ubiquitous in advanced capitalist economies, particularly the U.S. In contrast to prior commentators like Philip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic) and Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), Illouz approaches her subject with studied neutrality: She largely refrains from passing judgment on the broader cultural and political effects of therapeutic culture, and she eschews a Foucaldian view that associates psychological discourse with "surveillance" or the exercise of power "by other means." Her fundamental claim is that the therapeutic outlook has acquired a powerful hold because it "works"-that is, it helps modern men and women negotiate the problems that modernity poses to selfhood. These problems include "the uncertainty generated by the incipient democratic norms and rules in the workplace, and in the family, the multiplicity of social roles assumed by men and women, and the complexity of a culture riddled with contradictory normative imperatives" (p. 243). Though often more suggestive than definitive, Saving the Modern Soul is an ambitious book that addresses big questions with intelligence and insight.

Illouz's new work builds upon and extends arguments that she has developed in a number of prior works (Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture; Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism; and Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism). In keeping with the elusive nature of her topic, she draws on a wide range of data, including articles in popular women's magazines, self-help books, professional psychological literature, novels, movies, autobiographies, and talk shows. In addition, Illouz conducted two ethnographic studies at self-help workshops and interviewed a variety of individuals, including MBA students, retired corporate managers and business consultants, and individuals who either had or had not undergone extensive therapy. While these interviews provide some of the book's richest material, Illouz's use of them raises questions, for she tends to draw large conclusions based on fairly narrow samples. Moreover, though Illouz conducted research in both the United States and Israel, she does not directly address the question of national difference. The final chapter of the book includes an intriguing discussion of "cultural globalization" which shows how therapeutic models that originated in the U.S. have acquired a global character. But it seems doubtful that processes of globalization have wholly negated national and cultural differences, especially given the central role that Protestant religiosity has historically played within American therapeutic culture.

The opening chapter on Freud sits somewhat oddly with the rest of the book, given that the examples of therapeutic culture later discussed bear only a tenuous relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis. To be fair, Illouz is less concerned with Freudian thought per se than with the "cultural models of the self " it popularized. Yet by focusing exclusively on Freud, she tends to obscure other important cultural and intellectual developments in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America, such as the mind cure movement, that also contributed to the rise of therapeutic culture.

The remaining chapters focus on how therapeutic culture transformed the workplace; the emergence of a new emphasis on "intimacy" in romantic and marital relationships; the growing JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs popularity of autobiographical narratives that define selfhood in terms of suffering; and the relationship between class stratification, globalization, and distinct emotional styles. Far-ranging in scope, these chapters include fresh and insightful discussions of numerous topics, from Elton Mayo and his famous Hawthorne studies, to the relationship between feminism and therapeutic culture, to the concept of emotional intelligence. Illouz is exceptionally adept at laying out broad questions and articulating her own views in relation to a vast body of scholarly literature. But her analysis of her own research findings, which appear later in each chapter, at times seems underdeveloped.

A central argument running through several chapters is that the twentieth century witnessed a "general shift toward emotional androgyny," as men were increasingly expected to display such "feminine" traits as sensitivity and empathy. This is a compelling argument, and Illouz develops it well. Yet it is curious that she does not address the sizable body of self-help literature (such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Deborah Tannen's You Just Don't Understand ) that contends that the two sexes communicate in fundamentally different ways. The phenomenal success of these books would seem to suggest either that, for many people, the notion that men and women are "wired" differently either still rings true, or that it is somehow proves useful when it comes to understanding and negotiating relationship conflict.

In sum, Saving the Modern Soul may not always leave the reader feeling entirely convinced or satisfied, but it is a compelling and provocative work that offers new ways of thinking about the transformation of emotional life and interpersonal relationships in recent times.