Constructing The Self, Constructing America

Book excerpt: In this ground-breaking cultural history of psychotherapy, historian and psychologist Philip Cushman shows how the development of modern psychotherapy is inextricably intertwined with that of the United States and how it has changed the way Americans view events and themselves. By tracing our various definitions of the self throughout history, Cushman reveals that psychotherapy is very much a product of a particular time and place—and that it has been fundamentally complicit in creating many of the ills it seeks to assuage.