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The system of education is today in the United States one of the primary means through which power forms compliant citizens who conform to state power. Like many other contemporary social networks and institutions—religion, the penal system, political commentary, the entertainment industry—institutions of education adapt to their own purposes a popularized discourse of therapy and psychological individualism that dilutes psychoanalytic theory and practice. Such psychologism is not only a simplistic dilution of the complexities of psychoanalysis; by enlisting psychoanalysis to naturalize a soothing cultural ideology, the psychologizing discourse of power perverts psychoanalysis's capacities for oppositional analysis and ethical action. Lacan's consistent objections to forms of American ego psychology and object relations therapies are, I think, expressions of the obstinate resistance of psychoanalysis to its use by modern state formations.
The discourse of therapeutic culture is especially apparent in higher education in California—that is, in the community college and state college and university systems, as well as in private colleges and universities. I want here to look at the prevalence of that discourse in a number of symptomatic locations: in the discourse of the profession, in admissions policy that has succeeded affirmative action in the University of California system, and in UC Berkeley's multiculturalism requirement.
First, influenced by counseling departments and administrative bureaucracies, instructors adopt a vocabulary of therapeutic psychology to describe and direct what they do in the classroom. So, for example, the purpose of higher education is said to be “raising self-esteem.” Teachers are reluctant to “assert authority” by grading student work and hence use methods of “peer evaluation” whereby students grade each other's work and provide their own final grades. Or, since extensive commentary on student writing is said to “inhibit confidence,” “or