Therapeutic culture and self-help literature
the "positive psychology code"
pp. 9-27
in: Tatiana Savoia Landini (ed), Norbert Elias and empirical research, Berlin, Springer, 2014Abstrakt
The present chapter is on the sociology of culture. In it, I make use of the theoretical framework of Norbert Elias"s The Civilizing Process. In the first part of The Civilizing Process, Elias analyzed the major European manner books. These were meant to teach courtly behavior to an aristocracy that was leaving war behind as a way of life and becoming a part of the court configuration. Throughout this massive political, social, and cultural change, the new aristocracy was required to tame its impulses and to reduce its violent behavior. (In the second part of Elias"s work, and of secondary interest for my analysis, he elaborated a theory of the formation of the modern state.) One of Elias"s theses was that the civilizing process entails the development and differentiation of ties of interdependence between people. The development of this interdependence marks the civilization direction from heterocontrol (in which people control their behavior through the presence of others) to self-control (in which people internalize their social constraints).
