Eramian Laura, Mallory Peter, Herbert Morgan
Dalhousie University, Canada.
St Francis Xavier University, Canada.
Cult Sociol. 2024 Dec;18(4):507-527. doi: 10.1177/17499755231157440. Epub 2023 Apr 10.
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.'
虽然治疗文化长期以来一直是人们思考和经营浪漫关系的一部分，但在他们对友谊的设想中却不那么突出。然而，基于我们对加拿大大西洋沿岸一个城市中孤独经历的访谈，我们发现治疗方式越来越多地塑造着人们对待友谊的方式，即使朋友们很少寻求正式治疗来处理他们的冲突。本文关注的是现代治疗文化，其强调个人幸福、自我认知以及“健康”而非“有毒”的关系，如何给人们在如何经营友谊方面带来相互冲突的文化要求。一方面，治疗文化鼓励人们寻找能够倾诉最私密感受和经历的朋友——那些会给予支持、理解和认可的朋友。另一方面，治疗文化同样告诫人们必须保持“界限”，以保护自己免受朋友的个人隐私披露或“创伤”影响。我们探讨这些双重要求对现代友谊意味着什么，以及人们如何体验其中的紧张关系。我们认为现代友谊可能变得困难的一个原因是，向朋友透露自己的私密感受或经历可能被解读为既是建立亲密关系，又是给他人增添麻烦，或者关键的是，这两者同时发生。我们的研究结果促使我们思考治疗文化如何可能越来越将友谊变成一个反思的对象或其他需要“优化”的东西，而不是提供一种逃避需要“努力经营”的关系的方式。
