Egalitarianism and Individual Autonomy in the Northern European Periphery

Abstract

In Chapter 8, I move on to describe a very different world, that of psychotherapy. Here I explore ways in which psychotherapy draws on the wider cultural context in which it is embedded, and choose in particular to look at the idea of individual autonomy. When trying to find ways to understand and develop mental-health–promoting patterns of social interaction, therapists and patients draw on a repertoire of meanings embedded in cultural history. In the Norwegian context, individual autonomy and egalitarianism constitute important parts of this repertoire (Sørensen and Stråth 1997). In the first part of the chapter, I focus on family therapy, which, to me, serves as a particularly interesting illumination of these themes. The second part elaborates another major and related theme in this book: how specific institutional contexts play an important role in assisting people in constructing worldviews, organizational boundaries in particular.