Daniel Nehring: Thin Selves: Popular Psychology and the Transnational Moral Grammar of Self-Identity

Lektüresitzung in Anwesenheit des Autors Thin Selves: Popular Psychology and the Transnational Moral Grammar of Self-Identity Daniel Nehring (Swansea University) Texgrundlage: Daniel Nehring & Dylan Kerrigan (2020) Thin selves: popular psychology and the transnational moral grammar of self-identity, Consumption Markets & Culture, 23:4, 319-341, DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2018.1516814 This article explores popular psychology as a transnational moral grammar. Academic debates have been sharply critical of popular psychology, and they have emphasised its association with neoliberal capitalism’s narratives of social relationships. However, scholarship on popular psychology has focused on the Global Northwest. The transnational diffusion of popular psychology remains poorly understood, as do its implications for experiences of self-identity in the Global South. This article conceptualises popular psychology as a moral grammar of transnational scale, whose diffusion is closely associated with the globalisation of neoliberal developmental models. Its argument is grounded in an analysis of the transnational market for self-help books. Drawing on publishing statistics, it documents the transnational circulation and consumption of self-help books. Through ethnographic research in Trinidad it then explores how some female readers in drawing on self-help books to account for their experiences of everyday life against the backdrop of neoliberal structural adjustment, personal insecurity and already existing local socio-cultural traditions of self-help instantiate a moral grammar of transnational popular psychology in potentially syncretic forms. Daniel Nehring is a senior lecturer in sociology at Swansea University. His work concerns the transnational diffusion of popular psychological knowledge, discourse, and practice, and the intersections between popular psychology and contemporary capitalism. He is a co-convenor of the international academic network Popular Psychology, Self-Help Culture, and the Happiness Industry, and he is an editor of the book series Therapeutic Cultures for Routledge. His last book, Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. With Dylan Kerrigan, he is the co-author of Therapeutic Worlds: Popular Psychology and the Socio-Cultural Organisation of Intimate Life (Routledge, 2018).