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The emotional climates of globalisation: the cult of short-termism characteristic of the contemporary era of globalisation has produced a code of self-analysis riddled with contradictions.

Article Excerpt
He was always punctual and approached psychotherapy as though it were simply one of the many business transactions he conducted daily. A good-looking man, a forty-eight-year-old high-tech computer whiz, Larry had accumulated buckets of money during the dot.com revolution and was now a millionaire several times over. He was, by his own reckoning, 'self-made', and remarked that he really only felt secure when he was 'in control' of a situation--which, for him, meant defining how things should be. Psychotherapy was no exception.

The idea that other people could engender different emotional states or frames of mind in Larry was foreign. It simply never arose for his consideration. People, much like things, were there for his pleasure, his manipulation. Not that he approached the world in a cynical way, he stressed. It was just the way the world worked. Period.

People see me as something of a control freak I know, and they may be right ... But that desire for control goes all the way down, and it is, ultimately, a result of the way my mother related to me. She always said it was important to fit in, to belong. But that was just a cover, a way of getting me to do what she wanted, to dance to her tune. And so, this is where projection comes in. I've taken what happened from my childhood, what was done to me, and I'm now putting it on others, making them dance to my tune.

Larry's reference to 'projection' gives some indication of the way he approached psychotherapy, the latest of his attempts to purchase care of the self. Before beginning therapy, he had gotten hold of all the books his psychoanalyst-a prominent and respected professional--had written. He read them intensely, as if studying for exams. He'd also immersed himself in the self-help literature. It was as if he believed the only way he could reflect on the psychological meanings of his life was to affect a kind of 'therapy-speak', as if copying a discourse promoted by experts.

The language of therapy is, in fact, a form of talk that by and large ignores the socially and historically fragile, but fundamental, division between public and private life, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the therapeutic injunction to free associate. The notion of 'free association' appealed to Larry's finely tuned commercial instincts: Freud's precept that the patient should be released to a kind of unconscious dreaming had become, in Larry's hands, a new way into thinking about the behavioural imperatives of the global marketplace for flexibility, fluidity and continual self-reinvention. If he could successfully organise his daily working life and manage to negotiate all sorts of significant changes within the company that he owned, then surely self-change wasn't going to be that difficult. Flexibility creates dynamism in the marketplace and so may actually induce big emotional changes in personal life also. But how to be flexible? Really flexible. Emotionally flexible.

Larry's desire for flexibility was somewhat constrained by his inflexible attitude that all things had to be done quickly. Speed was a supreme value in his life--the accelerating pace of technology, after all, had made him a rich man. But not so therapy, which--as Larry discovered--works with an altogether different understanding of time. Therapy, after all, isn't exactly famous for getting fast results. A colleague had told him to read a well-known book on self-therapy, a kind of guide to becoming one's own therapist.

Possibly you're feeling restless. Or you may feel overwhelmed by the demands of wife, husband, children or job. You may feel unappreciated by those people closest to you. Perhaps you...

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