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Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help
Abstract
The language of psychology is all-pervasive in American culture—from The Sopranos to Oprah, from the abundance of self-help books to the private consulting room, and from the support group to the magazine advice column. Saving the Modern Soul examines the profound impact of therapeutic discourse on our lives and on our contemporary notions of identity. Eva Illouz plumbs today's particular cultural moment to understand how and why psychology has secured its place at the core of modern identity. She examines a wide range of sources to show how self-help culture has transformed contemporary emotional life and how therapy complicates individuals' lives even as it claims to dissect their emotional experiences and heal trauma.
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“The improvement of the self, under its many labels such as self-care, self-management and others, reflects the generalized self-help cultural mode (Illouz, 2008) and is a strategy to deal with the latest mode(s) of capitalism that require constant self-modulation to adapt to changing and precarious economic and social circumstances (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999, Deleuze 1992).”
From ‘YOU CANNOT EXPECT SUCH VALIDATION IN REAL LIFE:’ HISTORICAL CONTINUITIES AND CHANGE IN WOMEN’S ROMANCING WITH AI CHATBOT REPLIKA (2025) · cites this paper as Illouz, 2008
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Cited by
The gendered nature of self-help
Riley, S., Evans, A., Anderson, E., & Robson, M. (2019) · Feminism & Psychology · doi:10.1177/0959353519826162 · Cited by 59
Yoga in Penitentiary Settings: Transcendence, Spirituality, and Self-Improvement
Griera, M. (2017) · Human Studies · doi:10.1007/s10746-016-9404-6 · Cited by 42
More-Than-Human, More-Than-Digital: Postdigital Intimacies as a Theoretical Framework
Evans, A., & Ringrose, J. (2025) · Social Media + Society · doi:10.1177/20563051251317779 · Cited by 35
Struggling to Be a "Happy Self"? Psychotherapy and the Medicalization of Unhappiness in Uganda
Vorhölter, J. (2019) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/702337 · Cited by 18
Critical Integral Contemplative Education
Forbes, D. (2016) · Mindfulness in Behavioral Health · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-44019-4_23 · Cited by 15
Metadata
- Authors
- Illouz, E.
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2008-03-04
- Cited by
- 1,017
- References
- 0
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1525/9780520941311
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- Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520941311
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
