Note on the logic of "mental health" and the therapeutic in capitalist society

The inculpation that is latent in most therapeutic discourses does not posit an alternative to the sin identified with which persons are effectively reproached. The idea of normality stands in for the absence of the properly philosophical project and object that are constituted in a kind of research aimed at an ethics an understanding of what is the good life and how to achieve or realize it. The inculpations follow the logic of the society's contradictions, and truly creative responses are excluded from the therapeutic discourse because its purpose is not productive but correctional and reparative. Correctional procedures assign and work on lack, and they must keep the individual in a state of irremediable lack, outside the semblance or imagination of creativity in the productivity of work. The regulating idea is the identification and confession or accounting for of sin. This requires and presupposes the isolation of individuals, their having been taken aside or out, and this has the consequence that for this person the work, often joyful, of thinking as situated in the indeterminate space of a being-with is deprived of that sociality. Now you can confess your faults or participate in understanding them through an analysis of their causes or meanings, but strictly speaking, you are not expected or permitted to think. Nothing interesting can be said or acknowledged as thought. You are in the realm of sad necessity instead of joyful possibility. The crises to which the system, and particular enterprises or activities with it, is prone, must be attributed to something theoretically outside it. And in this case it is you. The logic here is similar to the obsession of bourgeois society with private property's opposite and other side, which is "violence" and crime. You will be vigilantly interrogated about the disposition imputed to you of "violence," meaning oppositional thought and will, disagreement, dissidence, and all this as latent in discontent. There are no dispositions that are to be affirmed; all that can be is a normality that is only definable as the absence of observable personality traits or behavioral dispositions, since these are conceived of only as risks, or liabilities. There is nothing new under the sun of surveillant and correctional or therapeutic discourses and practices aimed at addressing systemic failures or crises by assigning and managing lack.