Friendship, Intimacy, and the Contradictions of Therapy Culture

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2964166
AutoresL Eramian (0000-0002-5927-0078, Dalhousie University, autor de correspondencia), Peter Mallory (St. Francis Xavier University), Morgan Herbert (Dalhousie University)
Año2024
Volumen18
Número4
Páginas507-527
Fecha de publicación2024-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCultural Sociology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1749-9755 • E-ISSN: 1749-9763
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/17499755231157440
PMID39555306
OpenAlexW4363675220
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas9
Referencias citadas34

While therapy culture has long been a part of the repertoires through which people think about and practice their romantic relationships, it has been less prominent in how they envision friendship. However, based on our interviews on experiences of friendlessness in an Atlantic Canadian city, we show that therapeutic styles increasingly shape how people orient to friendship, even as friends rarely seek formal therapy to manage their conflicts. This article focuses on how modern therapy culture, with its emphasis on individual wellbeing, self-knowledge, and 'healthy' rather than 'toxic' relationships, presents people with conflicting cultural imperatives for how to practice their friendships. On the one hand, therapy culture encourages people to seek out friends to whom they can disclose their most intimate feelings and experiences - friends who will offer support, understanding, and validation. On the other hand, therapy culture equally cautions that one must maintain 'boundaries' to protect oneself from friends' personal revelations or 'traumas.' We ask what these dual imperatives mean for modern friendship and how people experience the tension between them. We argue that one reason modern friendship can be difficult is that divulging one's intimate feelings or experiences to a friend can be interpreted as either building intimacy or burdening others with one's problems, or crucially, both at the same time. Our findings lead us to ask how therapy culture might increasingly turn friendship into a reflexive object or something else to 'optimize' rather than providing an escape from relationships that demand 'work

Feeling · Friendship · Psychoanalysis · Reflexivity · Romance · Social science · Sociology · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics · Community Health and Development · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology