Abstract
This article presents the controversial role of emotions in projects of self-realization through the particular practice of empathetic caring. Israeli life coaches claim to allow minimal space for trainees’ emotions: they teach them to master self-steering through a calculative reflexivity that also aims to limit affect. At the same time, they engage with their trainees’ feelings by invoking emotional reactions only to argue against their trainees’ subjective experiences. The article traces this mixture of “emotion-free” empathy and authoritative neoliberal technologies of the self to a culturally specific Israeli notion of care which is grounded in an egalitarian ethos. I therefore showed that Israeli coaching produces a unique vernacular version of neoliberal selfhood, one infused with tensions between seemingly incompatible attitudes: self-reflection and authoritarian assertions and a type of empathetic concern that is centered on the caregiver's assessment rather than the feelings of those being cared for.
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