ABSTRACT
As previous chapters have emphasized, liberation psychotherapy’s ascent to cultural power engendered a variety of problems in people’s closest relationships. These problems, I have argued, are in part the natural, if unfortunate, complement to the demise of what had been established ways of arranging the relations between and among culture, identity, and social institutions; in even larger part, they are also bom of the difficulties with institutionalizing liberation psychotherapy, its inability to replace what it encouraged people to reject, particularly those relationships and institutions with which the individual is most intimately connected on a day to day basis: families, neighborhoods, communities, and the like. In modem societies, these mediating or intermediate institutions, as they have been called (because they stand between and mediate the relationship between the individual and the abstract and powerful structures of economy and state), are the ones most directly charged with the task of socialization; it is in and through these institutions that cultures reproduce themselves across time and that identity is “socially bestowed [and] socially sustained.” 1 Because they are responsible for passing on culture’s symbolic and moral prescriptions and proscriptions, for impressing inherited beliefs and values upon each new generation, and because liberation psychotherapy views these practices as the repressions from which pathology is bom, these mediating institutions were the primary targets of liberation psychotherapy’s invective: It is in these most direct and intimate relationships that the external imposition of expectations and demands is most readily apparent and keenly felt.
