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In his book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America, Philip Cushman reminds us that the social realm has a powerful impact on the configuration of the self, and he presents a sweeping hermeneutical analysis of how American culture has constructed the self since the Civil War. While most of the book is dedicated to situating the construction of the self within American historical and cultural contexts, the most challenging implications of his argument come in his critique of psychotherapy, particularly psychoanalysis, in America. It is in this critique of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis as an “objective,” “apolitical” science dealing with “universal” and “ahistorical” selves that he persuasively argues that psychotherapy discourse is always about the moral and the political. The challenge, then, is to develop a subversive psychotherapy that refuses to unwittingly reinforce current configurations of the self (which, since World War II, Cushman characterizes as an “empty” self) through its theories and practices. This is not a small task, but Cushman provides an important piece of scholarship promoting the reintegration of the social, moral, and political into psychotherapy.
Influenced by Foucault, Gadamer, and Heidegger, Cushman argues that the self is always a product of the historical, cultural, and moral landscape and is constructed by those in power. The growing power of capitalism, the urbanization of America, and the increasing need to create consumers is kept at the fore throughout his analysis of the shifting configuration of the self in American history. The differing constructions of the self by those in power are well exemplified in his discussion of the differences between Europeans' and Americans' conceptions of the self during the Victorian age. Contrasting two “illnesses”—Freud's notion of hysteria with American neurologist George Beard's conception of neurasthenia— Cushman argues that Freud's notion of illness arising from uncontrolled sexual or a