Emotional Capital, A Critique Of The Theory Of Emotional Intelligence
In the second of the conferences that make up Frozen Intimacies, Eva Illouz He begins by making a comparison between Samuel Smiles, author of Self-help (1859), and Sigmund Freud.
Although it is true that currently the postulates of these two authors tend to be similar to such an extent that psychology is confused with self-help, The basic principles that give rise to them are considerably different
While Smiles considered that “moral force could overcome a person’s social position and destiny,” Freud “held the pessimistic conviction (…) that the ability to help oneself was conditioned by the social class to which one belonged.”
Therefore, for the father of psychoanalysis, “self-help and virtue” were not in themselves sufficient elements for a healthy psyche, since “only transference, resistance, work with dreams, free association – and not “volition” nor “self-control” – could lead to a psychic and, ultimately, social transformation.”
The fusion of psychology and self-help: the therapeutic narrative
To understand psychology’s approach to the popular culture of self-help, we should look at the social phenomena that began to become more pronounced in the United States starting in the 1960s: the discredit of political ideologies, the expansion of consumerism and the so-called sexual revolution they contributed to increasing a narrative of the self-realization of the self.
In addition, The therapeutic narrative managed to permeate the dominant cultural meanings through capillarity offered by a series of social practices related to the management of emotions.
On the other hand, the theoretical basis of the syncretism between psychology and self-help are the theses of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, for whom the search for self-realization, understood as “the motivation in every form of life to develop to the maximum its possibilities” was inherent to a healthy mind. This is how psychology became primarily a therapeutic psychology who, “by postulating an indefinite and constantly expanding ideal of health,” made self-actualization the criterion by which to increasingly classify emotional states as healthy or pathological.
Suffering and individualism in therapeutic narrative
Accordingly, Illouz presents a series of examples of how the therapeutic narrative depends entirely on previously establishing and generalizing a diagnosis in terms of emotional dysfunction in order to subsequently assert the presupposed prescriptive capacity. Therefore, self-realization needs to give meaning to the psychic complications in the individual’s past (“what prevents being happy, successful, and having intimacy”).
Consequently, The therapeutic narrative became a commodity with the performative capacity to transform the consumer into a patient (“since, in order to be better – the main product that is promoted and sold in this new field –, you must first be sick”), thus mobilizing a series of professionals related to psychology, medicine, industry pharmaceutical, the publishing world and television.
And since “it consists precisely in giving meaning to common lives as an expression (hidden or open) of suffering,” the interesting thing about the therapeutic narrative of self-help and self-realization is that it involves a methodological individualism, based on “the demand to express and represent one’s own suffering.” The author’s opinion is that the two demands of the therapeutic narrative, self-realization and suffering, were institutionalized in the culture, since they were in line with “one of the main models for individualism that the State adopted and propagated.” .
On the other hand, the field of mental and emotional health resulting from the therapeutic narrative is sustained through the competition it generates. Proof of this competence is the notion of “emotional intelligence”, which, based on certain criteria (“self-awareness, control of emotions, personal motivation, empathy, management of relationships”), allows considering, and stratifying, the aptitude of people in the social and, especially, work environment, while granting a status (cultural capital) and facilitates personal relationships (social capital) in order to obtain economic returns.
Likewise, the author reminds us that we should not underestimate the implications of emotional intelligence in the security of the self in the context of an intimacy that in the contemporaneity of late modernity appears extremely fragile.
