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Consuming Freud in Consumer Culture: Historicizing the Empty Self. John E. Toews. Pp. 13-26.
In Philip Cushman's book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, Freud's writings are viewed as a cultural text in which autonomy becomes linked to the domination of the irrational. The struggle to find human meaning increasingly came to be defined as primarily internal to the self, a process of self-definition, self-discipline, and self-control. On the other hand, the American understanding of the interior self viewed the self as inherently good and as capable of controlling the external world spiritually, an optimistic faith in secular salvation, strongly in contrast with Freud's “hermeneutics of suspicion.”
Following in the tradition of Michel Foucault, Christopher Lasch, and Elizabeth Lubeck, Cushman describes the search for the true or essential self which focuses on the individual and criticizes the way in which unconscious psychic desires can be manipulated, producing an apathetic conformity and willing normalization which legitimates the culture of professional soul healers and personality adjusters.
Psychotherapy, according to Cushman, is grounded in an unquestioning affirmation of a bounded, isolated, self-contained, and empty self, which fits into a culture of consumption because it defines healing as a filling up of the empty self. Cushman argues that there never was a real encounter between American therapies and Freud, because Freud was never allowed to speak with his own historical voice and from within his own culture. Indeed, even in Europe, opposing positions emerged rapidly, including such disciples of Freud as Adler, Jung, Reich, and Rank. Unconscious individual interiority was liberated, manifesting itself as an infinite desire for wholeness, recognition, and meaning.
Cushman points out the disturbing homogeneity between this mission statement and consumer capitalism. Psychotherapy has assumed an even more important role because of the collapse of the