Participants appear very comfortable with the emotional discourse offered in the empowerment workshops. Inspired by the style of the group-discussion moderators, who encourage reflexivity and emotional self-exploration, they incline heavily to a vocabulary of love, care, and giving when talking about their work experiences and aspirations. At the same time, many—particularly among the Jewish participants—tend to avoid talking about the practicalities of earning money or about discordances related to work. In Chapter 4, in attempting to analyze this disproportionate emphasis on the affectionate aspects of work and a certain disregard for its practical and aggressive aspects, I integrate two lines of scholarly literature: feminist writings about the gender contract—the cultural expectation that women should prioritize unpaid care work without withdrawing from the waged workforce altogether, and the anthropology and sociology of emotions. The analysis, not surprisingly perhaps, allows potentially conflicting interpretations. In some important respects the women’s discourse sounds self-defeating: the overt goal of the workshops is to help them increase their income; their culture accords general importance to their labor force participation, even as secondary breadwinners; and they themselves are eager to be gainfully employed. So in a sense, their inclination to talk about their work as a form of emotional altruism implicitly above material calculations reinforces the prevalent argument that empowerment schemes deceive women into believing that if only they learned to talk and walk middle class—like wives who are supported and therefore work primarily for fun, not as an economic imperative—they would actually become middle class. However, from a careful reading of the women’s discourse during the workshops I also suggest that their enthusiastic immersion in emotional talk has an intrinsic value that cannot be dismissed merely because it is uncritical or nonpractical. The discourse, I argue, gives the workshop participants a ready opportunity to practice a popular cultural style that is symbolically beyond their reach. It also charges them with affective energy and a sense of togetherness, offering some relief from their tiresome and mostly lonely daily struggles.
Numerous scholars to date have addressed the spectacular expansion of the psychotherapeutic domain since the middle of the twentieth century, and its infiltration into practically every aspect of social and cultural life. Philip Rieff (1966), already in the 1960s, linked it to the demise of the tyranny of the primary group. He commented that as people became increasingly crowded together in cities they learned to live more distantly from one another by maintaining strategically varied and numerous contacts. This move away from the cloying warmth of family and a small, face-to-face community meant a gradual reversal of the orientation of the self. Whereas in the former way of life the self was directed outward to communal purposes in which alone it could be realized and satisfied, it now had to redirect inward, yet without becoming lost in anomy. Psychotherapy offered just the right language and institutional setting for this.
Nikolas Rose (1990), in his exploration of the formation of modern governmentality, pointed out the role of the psychological sciences in producing knowledge about human subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and in shaping the self as a private entity, which is perpetually engaged in self-regulation. Similarly, Philip Cushman (1995) in his cultural history of psychotherapy in the United States traced the manifold ways in which the ideology of self-contained individualism or the valuing of inner feelings operate as technologies of self. Despite its explicit claim to objectivity, he argued, psychotherapy was inevitably involved in the exercise of power and in reproducing the existing social order.
Arlie R. Hochschild (1983) looked at the commodification of emotions in the workforce, as job descriptions require employees to exercise emotions in selective and highly controlled ways; she likewise looked at the commercialization of intimate lives, for example, in the self-help book industry, and the recasting of therapeutic language in a spirit of instrumental consumption (Hochschild 2003). Following Hochschild’s groundbreaking work, a substantial body of studies now documents the growing demands on employees’ emotional labor across a whole range of service professions: preparing and serving food; responding at call centers, rape-crisis and trauma hotlines, or sex lines; working in the global care chain that sends people from poor countries to nurse and serve others in rich countries, and many more.
In many cultures, including in Israel, emotions and economic activity are imagined as separate and even hostile spheres, so their merger assumes a form of symbolic defilement. But in practice, as Viviana Zelizer shows for the United States, this intersection is essential for the maintenance of social relations: “money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it” (2005: 28). Along similar lines, but with greater focus on the working of capitalism as a system, Eva Illouz (2007) looks at how the integration of psychotherapeutic narratives into the market creates commodified forms of selfhood. A wide variety of talk shows, self-help books, well-being workshops, meditation and purification retreats, dating websites, co-counseling circles, and related opportunities for self-modification flood the marketplace, drawing people to reinvent themselves through a supply of ever-cheaper and more accessible tools. Intriguingly, this method works by appearing to lift people above material consumption, which is deemed necessary for a truly authentic engagement. This consumption is commonly imagined as antithetic to the more traditional kind, where material goods are flaunted as status symbols. Ostensibly independent of economic means, it draws on emotional competence, namely, the capacity to talk reflexively about the self and about relationships. Yet as Illouz (1997, 2007) shows, it is as entangled as before in the capitalist class system, where taste, style, and cultural competence replace material commodities that have become too common.
Last but not least, the enormous popularity of therapeutic narratives feeds on a deep-seated quest for authenticity dating back to the early phases of modernity and continues unabated through the present late modernity. Charles Lindholm (2008, 2013) traces the yearning for authenticity to the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed it was necessary to demand absolute honesty from the world and from himself by indulging his own inner emotional demands regardless of the opinions of others. Attired in different garb according to period and cultural context, the quest for authenticity has propagated into more and more spheres of cultural production. It is found in music, the arts, or culinary fashions; in the evaluation of work and leisure alike by the degree to which they allow connection to the inner self; in the pursuit of self-realization in adventure sports; and of course in romantic relationships. In Israel too, as Tamar Katriel (2004) shows, the quest for authentic dialogue has characterized Hebrew ways of speaking since the early decades of the twentieth century, although it has also undergone significant changes in style and focus over time. Ironically, as Lindholm (2008) notes, the more people intensify their search for authenticity in “the marketplace of the soul” and engage in an intricate dialectics of authenticity and imitation, the more it becomes commodified and standardized.
Paradoxes, in fact, abound in this mutual entanglement of psychotherapy and consumer capitalism. For example, handing over emotional life from relatives to experts and professionals—psychologists, life-coaches, talk show hosts, authors of advice books—entails an inner-contradictory outcome of emotional flooding and overall cooling (Hochschild 2003). While people are encouraged to talk and dissect their emotions to their minutest components, perhaps to the accompaniment of dramatic effects such as tears, moans, or shouts, the ultimate purpose is to attain better control and purposeful management of these emotions. Another paradox is that emotional discourses