Psychologization can simply be defined as the distribution of ‘psychological concepts, theories, methods, or techniques in everyday life, especially outside of professional settings’.¹ Although this standard definition avoids normative standpoints, the interest towards psychologization most repeatedly involves some kind of concern over ‘the unwarranted overspill of psychological discourse to all sort of life-domains’.²

This raises the peculiar question: why then has psychologization happened in the first place? The Moroccan-born French cultural sociologist Eva Illouz’s³ functionalist answer is that the current global therapeutic culture could not have come into being unless it helped people ‘do things’, that is help them cope, resolve practical questions in their daily lives, and ultimately offer a transnational language of the self.

Human beings have always needed a framework to interpret themselves and their surroundings. Culture regulates the self by making the world intelligible, maintains the psychologist Philip Cushman.⁴ In this way, culture completes the human being. But this is done by elevating certain ways of thinking and being while devaluing others.

Likewise, the historian of ideas Roger Smith⁵ insists that the question ‘What is a human being?’ cannot be answered in purely materialistic terms, for example by referring to our biology or genes. Human nature is not a ‘thing’ that lies waiting for us to uncover it; it is constantly active in its own self‑understanding. Over the course of history, the accumulated body of knowledge about what it means to be human has laid the groundwork for how we understand ourselves today. And if it is the case that we now talk about ourselves and the world in psychological terms, it is because this way of speaking at some point in history became an integrated part of common sense and everyday language – precisely what De Vos calls psychology’s role as a hegemonic discourse that supplies the signifiers and schemes we use to look upon ourselves and the world.

Such a cultural‑psychological approach leaves us better equipped to deal with the question: ‘Do we need psychology?’ or ‘Is the ongoing psychologization of human life unjustified?’ The answer need no longer be a categorical ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but can be both – and: we need psychology to understand ourselves, but only as long as psychology is our preferred framework of meaning for grasping our lives. People who did not live under a therapeutic worldview had other self‑ understandings (magical, religious or humanist), and in the future other ways of being human may arise (for example neurobiological or transhumanist ones). In this sense, the question is an open matter of negotiation.

About a decade ago, the Norwegian writer Geir Gulliksen6 was invited to reflect on this question. He pointed to the paradox that when psychology was something new in the nineteenth century, it must have felt enormously liberating through its potential to realize a greater share of the human register. Whereas today, we see that psychology in popular culture and public health campaigns primarily sells us conventional and labor-intensive images of ourselves: each one of us must seek their own happiness; and not only seek it out but actively work on it. For instance, by applying the evidence-based 5 Ways to Wellbeing – Connect with others, Be active, Take notice (mindfulness), Keep learning, and Give to others – to improve your mental health and boost happiness; and with these simple steps you can build resilience and foster a positive, balanced life.

Gulliksen admits that it can feel liberating to think we always have a choice: that our way of thinking decides whether we live in ‘heaven or hell’, and that by changing our mindset we can turn our whole life around. From this perspective, through principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), even an unbearable life – filled with restlessness, fear, and lack of peace – could, in theory, be changed just by learning to think differently. This places the responsibility for who you are and who you can become firmly on you and your thoughts.

Yet Gulliksen observes that in practice it often tends to be ‘others’ who are told they must change their language, mindset, and behavior: people with substance and gambling problems, welfare recipients, asylum seekers. These groups are urged to take responsibility for their situation – often even by psychologists – while the articulate middle class easily takes care of itself and assumes everyone else should be able to do the same.

There is a difference between how we talk about ourselves and how we talk about others. One thing is to talk about other people’s weaknesses and vulnerability; it is something entirely different, and far riskier, to talk about one’s own. It is probably more important for us to appear free and unencumbered than to be so. Everything in us that is not well adjusted and coping, we hide as well as we can, just as carefully now as in the 1950s. And how free are we then?

Gulliksen also remarks on how a psychological worldview and way of thinking coincide with a larger liberal political shift, which has also influenced the left: there has been a strong emphasis on individual responsibility and on each person’s capacity to change their own situation. The idea is to highlight people’s own resources, yet these resources are strangely unequally distributed, one might add.

Previously, the development of psychology as a discipline was meant to help people know themselves and each other better. Once, the goal was to realize a larger part of the human register. The recognition of the richness of human consciousness must have been revitalizing, Gulliksen writes. It was surely almost frightening as well – think of how many experienced psychoanalysis as making ‘everything about sexuality’ – yet this was also probably redemptive for our predecessors.

Now after the psychological revolution we have all become psychologists. And the psychology we practice on each other is a simplified version of whatever discourse currently dominates within the professional field. The psychology practiced in everyday life resembles an automated self-help manual designed to make it easier for us to sell ourselves to one another.

Gulliksen speculates whether psychology, which once offered us the freedom to create ourselves, has run out of steam in the new millennium; from being something opening to something closing? A psychology running on empty?

In studies of the epoch‑making growth of psychology in the twentieth century there is some support for Gulliksen’s suspicion. For example, the British sociologist Nikolas Rose’s book Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self ⁷ is an extensive brief for how psychology and psychiatry throughout the 1900s served as an edifying expertise of governance for the emergence of advanced liberal democracies. Rose shows how psychology, in one area after another, has been central to the establishment of these democracies by creating a kind of human being who is responsible, free and self‑governing in line with the neoliberal conduct of conduct. From a power perspective, then, psychology is not primarily to be counted as an oppressor, but rather as something that has made it possible for individual citizens today to understand and steer themselves. Psychology has simply helped make us who we are, into self-regulated individuals who enjoy a level of autonomous freedom which our predecessors would have envied us.

At the end of the century, when psychology dominated every channel, Rose nevertheless remarks that ‘psychological man’ is only one of many possible ways of being human. But it seems that the freedom to break with the idea of human beings as self-governing individuals is limited. There is undeniably a weariness in the therapeutic project that ceaselessly admonishes us that the most important thing in life is to become better acquainted with ourselves. Yet since the free human being’s values of autonomy and self-realization are so thoroughly tied to psychological variables, it is today difficult, if not impossible, to imagine other ways of being human.

How is this so? The previously mentioned Illouz has compared the therapeutic worldview with other frameworks of meaning, such as the world religions. Their main task has been to answer why suffering is so unjustly distributed: ‘Why do the innocent suffer while the wicked prosper?’ Clinical psychology, she argues, is the first cultural system that abolishes this problem by making human unhappiness the result of a damaged or neglected psyche.

Religion’s aim of explaining, rationalizing and legitimizing suffering thus finds its complete expression in psychology. And this should worry us. For under the therapeutic ethos there is no longer any meaningless suffering, which has traditionally supplied the energy to overturn political or religious regimes. A system that can explain everything leaves little room for the kind of senseless suffering and chaos that might feed a new grand narrative – and thus little space for revolt.

A similar worry is expressed by the sociologist James Nolan Jr.⁸. Where is the emergency brake in therapeutic culture if it begins to work against its purpose, he asks. A situation in which psychology no longer functions as humanizing and liberating, and where actors from within themselves acknowledge the problem, is hard to imagine when authority is no longer based on external principles but on inner values. As Ludwig Wittgenstein already observed at the mid‑century breakthrough of psychoanalysis in culture: ‘Freud never shows us when we should stop.’⁹