Therapeutic Worlds

Daniel Nehring is Associate Professor of Sociology at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai. His research explores the personal consequences of globalisation and rapid social change. In particular, he is interested in the transnationalisation of therapeutic narratives of self and social relationships. He is the author of Sociology, a co-author of Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry and the co-editor of Intimacies and Cultural Change.Dylan Kerrigan is a lecturer in Anthropology and Political Sociology at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago. His research studies the way societies change over time and the cultural processes that accompany such change. He is a co-author of Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry and is currently developing a manuscript entitled Elites in the Caribbean.

• 1. The psychological imagination 2. Psychology and the social organisation of power 3. Transnational popular psychology in Trinidad 4. A brief social history of marriage, love, and intimacy in Trinidad 5. Love, intimacy, and relationship management 6. Adaptation, gender roles, and the need for self-help 7. Popular psychology and the colonisation of intimate life in Trinidad 8. The psychologisation of intimate life

'This impressive work offers fresh insights into the global reach of popular psychology and the ways in which it shapes intimate life. The book provides a valuable and much-needed contribution to studies of self-help and therapeutic cultures beyond the Global North. Drawing on an empirical study conducted in Trinidad and Tobago, Nehring and Kerrigan deftly blend historical analysis of local cultures and practices of love and intimacy and the ongoing effects of colonisation with personal accounts of the ways in which people draw on popular psychology in their own lives. This compelling book demonstrates the transnational movement of ‘psy’ discourse – how it travels and becomes embedded in local cultures and practices, and in turn how this shapes self-identity and social relationships. A must read for anyone interested in debates about therapeutic culture and sociological accounts of intimacy, individualisation and the global circulation of popular psychology.' - Katie Wright, La Trobe University; author of The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change