Sociologist Eva Illouz argues that contemporary therapeutic culture paradoxically creates a 'democracy of pain' where suffering becomes the basis of authenticity, giving individuals perverse incentives to perform, protect, and amplify their own wounds rather than heal from them.
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Suffering = Authenticity? #Victimhood #Therapy #CultureOfComplaint #Sociology #EmotionalCapitalism
Added:The therapeutic mode Illouz writes, "paradoxically privileges suffering and trauma."
She borrows a phrase from the art critic Robert Hughes describing the result as a democracy of pain, a culture of complaint in which the dominant therapeutic narrative quote, "ironically creates much of the suffering it is supposed to alleviate."
Unquote.
When suffering becomes the basis of authentici- authenticity, the subject then has a perverse incentive to perform, protect, and amplify its own wound.
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