The Sociology of Psychologies: Re-Theorising Moral Life in an Age of Uncertainty

Around the world, everyday life is increasingly characterised by anxiety and uncertainty about the future, against the backdrop of the ‘poly-crisis’ of economic adversity, global heating, and geo-political fragmentation and conflict. In turn, psychotherapeutic knowledge, in diverse, bio-medical, spiritual, and religious forms, has arguably become a pervasive moral idiom through which individuals respond to anxiety and frame care and mental healing and well-being for self and others.

Nonetheless, this ‘therapeutic turn’ has arguably remained under-theorised. There is an extensive body of attendant scholarship, in sociology and across the social sciences. However, this scholarship has tended to focus on a few societies in the Global Northwest, neglecting everyday experiences and practices of mental well-being in the Global South, alongside transnational connections in popular therapeutic discourses, products, and services. While research on therapeutic cultures has arguably burgeoned in recent years, in response to internationally widely shared concerns about a ‘mental health crisis’, its theoretical and empirical perspectives have remained partial.

In response, drawing on extensive fieldwork in East Asia, the Americas, and Europe since 2004, I develop a ‘sociology of psychologies’ that re-thinks the therapeutic turn and its cultural and socio-political consequences. Through this sociology of psychologies, I aim to re-theorise everyday therapeutic cultures in an age of poly-crisis and make a case for a field of sociological enquiry whose concepts, themes, and methodologies may inform broader debates about social cohesion and conflict, change, and inequalities. My argument builds on extensive research conducted in Latin America, the USA, the Caribbean, Europe, and East Asia since 2004. On this basis, I draw attention to the broadly transnational scale of the therapeutic turn, the ontologically heterogeneous, bio-medical, religious, and spiritual discourses and practices that constitute it, and the implication of these discourses and practices in the colonisation, de-colonisation, and re-colonisation of social life