Keele Research Repository

This essay critically engages with the view that governmentality defined the parameters of psychotherapy in the late twentieth century. Even though different therapeutic schools embraced the values of autonomy, authenticity, and self-control, the meaning of these objectives varied, and gave rise to interpretations that were not confined to the goal of (“neoliberal”) self-optimization. While in some cases contemporaries associated psychotherapy with familiar (Enlightenment and middle-class) aims of sovereignty of reason and emotional restraint, in other instances they highlighted functionality and efficiency as desirable outcomes of therapy. The essay explores debates around personal self-actualization against the backdrop of psychoanalytic discourse in Germany between 1970 and 1990.