Self-Help, Media Cultures and the Production of Female Psychopathology

Lisa Blackman

doi:10.1177/1367549404042496

Abstract

This article brings together work at the intersection of critical psychology and cultural studies to explore the psychological and cultural significance of women’s magazine culture. Drawing on rhetorical psychology and Foucault’s later work on ‘techniques of the self’, it explores the complex injunctions and positionings that create the range of gendered anxieties and dilemmas produced within neoliberal relations. Self-help is discussed as a practice that condenses or brings together a range of cultural anxieties, bodily tensions, emotional economies and forms of psychopathology which are ‘already constituted’ lived realities for many of the readers engaging with these magazines. The article concludes that further engagement with critical psychology by cultural theorists will enable cultural studies to bring the body back into cultural theory and to consider the translation of cultural injunctions across the designations of race, class, sexuality and gender.

Highlights

This article will provide ways of thinking through the cultural and psychological significance of media forms considered peculiarly feminine, and how these cultures work in conjunction with female psychologies
How can we think and re-think the cultural and psychological significance of these media cultures taking into account that ‘media use is never an isolated process, but a collective process’ (Hermes 1995:24)? How can we begin to engage with the question of subjective commitment and investment, which seem crucial in addressing the rise of self-help practices in our lives? I am not offering a foolproof method for re-conceptualising these concerns, I will point to some work within critical psychology on ‘psychologies of survival’ as signalling possible ways forward
‘cancer stories’ argues that self-help or ‘self-health’ constructs suffering in a particular kind of way. Failure in these practices is constituted as a temporary obstacle to overcome, and as we have seen these practices map onto the very kinds of embodied experience which ‘make up’ many women’s subjectivities7. Rather than viewing these resolutions and the practices promulgated on the basis of these self-relations as progressive and ‘unfixing’ femininity, I want to suggest that the dilemmatic quality of feminine discourses and the regulative practices pro-offered as resolutions, condense a range of bodily sensations, anxieties, tensions and forms of psychopathology which are ‘already-constituted’ lived realities for many of the readers engaging with these magazines

Summary

Introduction

This article will provide ways of thinking through the cultural and psychological significance of media forms considered peculiarly feminine, and how these cultures work in conjunction with female psychologies. I will argue that contemporary cultural studies is characterised by an ‘anti-psychologism’, many arguments engaging with the production of identity implicitly and often explicitly draw on generalist understandings of psychology in order to address the production of female subjectivities. Generalist accounts are indicative of a more general reliance by social and cultural theory on sociological arguments, which examine the emergence of new forms of identity and subjectivity, created within changing social, cultural and governmental circumstances (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001, Rose 1996) These arguments focus upon the production of particular kinds of psychology, through the ways in which institutional practices and the discourses that help to support them create particular kinds of self-practice and understanding. This is a more general problem with media and cultural studies which I explore with Valerie Walkerdine in Mass Hysteria (2001), a book which develops work in Critical Psychology at the intersection of media and cultural studies

Mass Hysteria

Magazine Culture

Rhetorical Psychology

Cultural Production of Psychopathology

Conclusion