Daniel Tutt - The Perils of the New Intimacy: Paternalism, Class and the Changing Function of the Therapeutic

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s redefined the bonds of romance and its effects have shaped the private sphere of intimacy, in ways that have promoted a more egalitarian form of marriage and matrimony. But these changes occurred in a context of profound wealth and class inequality since the late 1970s, resulting in the instrumentalization of love and marriage. Today, the marriage bond is centered around the maximization of pleasure and self-worth, and potential marriage partners are sought out to provide the necessary stability for each partner to achieve these aims. This has created a process of what the sociologist Eva Illouz refers to as “unloving”, or the process in which people reject forms of intimacy due to the market instrumentalization that has overrode intimacy. And the material effects of this process have affected middle- and working-class people in different ways. Within marriages today, the rise of assortative marriage, or people marrying within the class of their origin, and the significant increase in divorce amongst working class people point to a quiet class conflict over marriage, family, and matrimony.

In this talk, we will examine the function of the therapeutic, or the cultural and social process in which therapy has become a necessary supplement to preparing individuals for lasting romantic bonds. Specifically, we will examine how the therapeutic is embraced by working class people by relying on ethnographic studies and we will examine how these findings point to a different dynamic of the therapeutic than many critics once thought. In the face of these new class dynamics and the crisis of youth mental health in the wake of the pandemic, is the therapeutic still the source of a narcissism epidemic as Christopher Lasch, Philip Rieff and other warned?

Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. is an American philosopher with a focus on psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, and Marxist thought. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the Palgrave Lacan Series and How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. Daniel is an adjunct professor of philosophy at George Washington University and Marymount University, and he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. Tutt is the convener of Study Groups on Psychoanalysis and Politics a public learning platform that offers study groups, seminars, and podcasts on psychoanalytic, political and philosophical topics for the general public. His research is concerned with psychoanalysis and politics, new directions in Marxist thought, the family, social reproduction debates, the legacy of anti-Oedipal politics, contemporary and historical liberalism, Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism, and the social power of the intellectual.