Clark, Claire D. (Author)
History of Psychology
Volume: 15, no. 3
Issue: 3
Pages: 233-246
Publication date: 2012
Language: English
Popular media depictions of intervention and associated confrontational therapies often implicitly reference---and sometimes explicitly present---dated and discredited therapeutic practices. Furthermore, rather than reenacting these practices, contemporary televised interventions revive them. Drawing on a range of literature in family history, psychology, and media studies that covers the course of the last 3 decades, this paper argues that competing discourses about the nuclear family enabled this revival. Historians such as Stephanie Coontz, Elaine Tyler May, and Natasha Zaretsky have demonstrated that the ideal nuclear family in the post-WWII United States was defined by strictly gendered roles for parents and appropriate levels of parental engagement with children. These qualities were supposedly strongly associated with middle-class decorum and material comfort. By the 1970s, this familial ideal was subjected to a variety of criticisms, most notably from mental health practitioners who studied---or attempted to remedy---the problematic family dynamics that arose from, for example, anxious mothers or absent fathers. After psychological professionals began to question the logic of treating maladjusted individuals for the sake of preserving the nuclear family, a therapeutic process for doing exactly that was popularized: the addiction intervention. The delayed prevalence of therapeutic interventions arises from a tension between the psychological establishment that increasingly viewed the nuclear family as the primary site and source of social and psychological ills, and the producers of popular media, who relied on the redemptive myth of the nuclear family as a source of drama. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Weinstein, Deborah F.;
(2004)
Culture at Work: Family Therapy and the Culture Concept in Post-World War II America
Article
Mold, Alex;
(2004)
The “British System” of Heroin Addiction Treatment and the Opening of Drug Dependence Units, 1965--1970
Article
Bennett, Cary;
(2011)
Methadone Maintenance Treatment: Disciplining the “Addict”
Thesis
Claire D. Clark;
(2014)
Therapeutic Communities and the Cultural Politics of Addiction Treatment, 1958-1974
Article
Cantor, David;
(2006)
The Frustrations of Families: Henry Lynch, Heredity, and Cancer Control, 1962--1975
Book
Weinstein, Deborah;
(2013)
The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy
Article
Madeleine Wood;
(2025)
Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction: Relational harm and the child as witness
Article
Dehue, Trudy;
(2004)
Historiography Taking Issue: Analyzing an Experiment with Heroin Abusers
Article
Yichen Rao;
(2019)
From Confucianism to Psychology: Rebooting Internet Addicts in China
Article
Courtwright, David T.;
(2010)
The NIDA Brain Disease Paradigm: History, Resistance and Spinoffs
Book
Mark Jackson;
(2021)
Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis
Book
Robbie Duschinsky;
(2020)
Cornerstones of Attachment Research
Article
Darin Weinberg;
(2021)
Freedom and addiction in four discursive registers: A comparative historical study of values in addiction science
Chapter
Carr, E. Summerson;
(2013)
Motivating Denial: The Shifting Semiotics of American Addiction Counseling
Chapter
Meyers, Todd;
(2013)
A Few Ways to Become Unreasonable: Pharmacotherapy inside and Outside the Clinic
Book
Raikhel, Eugene A.;
Garriott, William Campbell;
(2013)
Addiction Trajectories
Book
Sara E. Black;
(2022)
Drugging France: Mind-Altering Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chapter
Saris, A. Jamie;
(2013)
Committed to Will: What's at Stake for Anthropology in Addiction
Article
Stanley Finger;
Elisabetta Sirgiovanni;
(2024)
The electrified artist: Edvard Munch’s demons, treatments, and sketch of an electrotherapy session (1908–1909)
Book
Michelle Smirnova;
(2023)
The Prescription-to-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain
Be the first to comment!