著者

山家 歩

出版者

社会学研究会

雑誌

ソシオロジ (ISSN:05841380)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.47, no.3, pp.71-86,178, 2003-02-28 (Released:2016-05-25)

被引用文献数

1

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the roles which the concept of dependency plays in current regime of the self, through articulating self-governance of people, with rationalities and technologies of political power. Nikolas Rose and others argue that, over the last two decades, proliferation of psy-expertise has been intrinsically linked with the emergency of new political rationalities in comtemporary liberal democracies, which they call "advanced liberal government". In this new governmental regime, the articulation of "therapy culture" and "enterprise culture" provide important means to link conduct of the self with the conduct of others. The concept of dependency is often said to be chaotic and is object of controversies among various psy-experts and other experts. However people have increasingly come to understand and act on themselves through the concept of dependency. Problems of dependency are important elements of "therapy culture". In origin, the concept of dependency was understood to be related to alcohol and drugs. Dependents were 'deviant' minorities. But, since 1980's, this concept comes to have connection to many other objects. Today, dependents are regard to be dependent on not only substances but also various objects, actions, and processes, like sports, sex, shopping, eating , gambling, love, computer, etc.. The experts of dependencies emphasize that everyone can be pathological dependents. This transformation of the concept extend the fields of intervention of psy-expertises. Our exercises of freedom come to be problematized in termes of dependency. When one is dependent, he can not be thought to exercise his freedom in proper way. Psy-experts insist that to recover from the state of dependency, they need to recover from all sorts of dependeicies. This concept enable psy-experts to intervene everyday practices of lay people to shape them as free-rensponsible subjects of choice.