In therapy we trust
Subtitle: America's obsession with self-fulfillment
By: Eva S. Moskowitz.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2001
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 342
Subjects: Social problems -- United States -- History -- 19th century; Social problems -- United States -- History -- 20th century; Psychotherapy -- Popular works; Happiness; Self-actualization (Psychology); United States -- Social conditions
Genres: Popular works.
Description: "Beginning with the example of a "Mind Cure" developed by mid-nineteenth-century clockmaker Phineas P. Quimby, Moskowitz explains how Americans' growing fascination with therapy led them to adopt new kinds of reform - including, at the turn of the twentieth century, provisions for psychological services in prisons, courts, hospitals, and schools. Depression-era divorce rates prompted colleges and high schools to offer courses on marital happiness and produced a new marriage-counseling industry.

During World War II, Moskowitz shows, the army devoted unprecedented energy to a soldier's "psychological readiness for combat." Moskowitz also explores more recent developments, including Cold War-era psychological assumptions of magazine campaigns that targeted unhappy housewives. She confronts the social protest movements in the 60s and the explosion of 70s self-help fads that continue to the present.".

"In a study that encompasses all aspects of American society - from television talk shows to the criminal justice system, from office politics to world politics - Moskowitz identifies a debilitating "sense of self" that is intimately bound up with the major developments of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references ([311]-326) and index.
Table of contents: title: The therapeutic gospel; title: Illness : a new cure, a new faith, 1850-1900; title: Poverty : reformers offer treatment, 1890-1930; title: Marriage : a science of personal relations, 1920-1940; title: War, the soldier's psyche, 1941-1945; title: Home : the unhappy housewife, 1945-1965; title: Social protest : liberating the psyche, 1960-1975; title: Feelings : expressing the self, 1970-1980; title: Personal problems and public debate.