On Nikolas Rose’s Governing the soul
A book review written 10 years ago......
Here is a book review I did for the psychotherapy journal Self and Society 10 years ago. It was on the book by Nikolas Rose Governing the soul: the shaping of the private self (2nd edn), Free Association Books, 1999. On a re-reading of this book, considering what has occurred in the last 6 years, the ideas that have resulted from his book and my thoughts in the review have become hauntingly more present. Think of the total complicity of psychotherapy organisations, mental health organisations/charities with medical fascism in recent times. Think of the totalitarian attempts to govern our health and every aspect of our way of life. Things have gotten far worse. This is why these ideas are uncannily even more relevant.
Here is a short quote from my review and the link to the full book review and response from Nikolas Rose below:
“Indeed, one can imagine another type of freedom and ethics. There are thousands of years of philosophy, the arts, music, literature and a whole host of radical psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic thinking which oppose or deconstruct the neoliberal fetish for sanitized well-being. Unfortunately, the majority of our psychologized and political culture ignores, dismisses or is ignorant of such thought. Rose does seem to dismiss (or at least omit) a radical psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic reading of the neoliberal malaise and its reliance upon Nietzsche’s nightmare of the religion of comfortableness. However, his book does open up the historical antecedents, and presents the effects of a sometimes arbitrary, sometimes Machiavellian Hegelian dialectic that has run for over 100 years, that has cornered the domain where our subjectivities are supposed to lie. Reading his book, while keeping in mind recent historical developments in the psy-field (e.g. evidence-based medicine in the talking therapies, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies [IAPT], CBT, Health and Care Professions Council [HCPC] and Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care [PSA] regulation)5 encourages a critical questioning of these developments. These are not, by any account, benign developments liberating us from our psychological hells. They should not be treated lightly or evade critique. Rose’s book begs us to ask the question: who has the right, and by what means, to govern the self? This is a subversive question, which it seems the architects of the technologies of the self and their associated industries (and recipients– or victims?) would perhaps rather dismiss and forget.”
Here is the response to my review by the author of the book, Nikolas Rose.
