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Postmodernist Psychobabble: The Recovery Movement for Individual Self-Esteem in Mental Health Since World War II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Hamilton Cravens
Hamilton Cravens
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
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Extract

By the middle 1990s the recovery movement for personal self-esteem and, thus, mental health for the individual, had reached a new level of penetration into American culture. Many commentators and interpreters of contemporary affairs judged the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, a potential recruit. As the archetypical adult child of an alcoholic parent—the product of a dysfunctional family if there ever was one, according to the movement's clerics-Clinton seemed lacking in selfesteem. His painful childhood was the culprit. And recovery was the solution. In a word, he was too anxious to please his critics—the classic trademark of the adult child of an alcoholic parent. Contemporary therapists taught that such persons were placaters of their critics because of the emotional abuse that their parents had inflicted on them, often for no apparent reason. The damaged child, regardless of his or her chronological age, could not, without appropriate therapy and personal “recovery,” ever get over such incidents, which were seared into their psychological and neurophysiological apparatus.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 9 , Special Issue 1: Health Care Policy in Contemporary America , January 1997 , pp. 141 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1997

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References

Notes

1. On the recovery movement, see Kaminer, Wendy, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Reading, Mass., 1992)Google Scholar. I would like to thank Professors M. Susan Lindee and Charles E. Rosenberg of the History and Sociology of Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Professors Michael Dietrich and James R. Griesemer, of the History and Philosophy of Science Program, University of California, Davis, for inviting me to give early (and crude) versions of this paper and for their hospitality. I would also like to acknowledge, with gratitude, the constructive criticisms and questions that they and their students so graciously offered me.

2. John Bradshaw is the current guru of the inner-child ideology. See, for example, his Healing the Shame That Binds You (Deerfield Beach, Fla., 1988).Google Scholar

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6. Much of the subsequent discussion is based on Hunt, J. McVicker, Intelligence and Experience (New York, 1960)Google ScholarPubMed, and on my Before Head Start: The Iowa Station and America's Children (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993).Google Scholar

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22. As cited in Harris, I'm O.K., You're O.K., 34–35.

23. See Bradshaw, Healing the Shame That Binds You.

24. Deming, W. Edwards, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, Mass., 1989 [1982]).Google Scholar