Saving the Modern Soul Therapy Emotions and the

Culture of Self Help Eva Illouz pdf download

https://ebookname.com/product/saving-the-modern-soul-therapy-
emotions-and-the-culture-of-self-help-eva-illouz/

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookname.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

SOS Help For Emotions 138490891st Edition Clark

https://ebookname.com/product/sos-help-for-emotions-138490891st-
edition-clark/

Passion and Paranoia Emotions and the Culture of

Emotion in Academia 1st Edition Charlotte Bloch

https://ebookname.com/product/passion-and-paranoia-emotions-and-
the-culture-of-emotion-in-academia-1st-edition-charlotte-bloch/

For the Soul of France Culture Wars in the Age of

Dreyfus 2nd Edition Frederick Brown

https://ebookname.com/product/for-the-soul-of-france-culture-
wars-in-the-age-of-dreyfus-2nd-edition-frederick-brown/

Jamie s America 1st Edition Jamie Oliver

https://ebookname.com/product/jamie-s-america-1st-edition-jamie-
oliver/
Soc Third Canadian Edition Brym

https://ebookname.com/product/soc-third-canadian-edition-brym/

CompTIA Network N10 005 Authorized Exam Cram 4th

Edition Edition Emmett Dulaney

https://ebookname.com/product/comptia-network-n10-005-authorized-
exam-cram-4th-edition-edition-emmett-dulaney/

Journalism Studies The Basics 1st Edition Martin Conboy

https://ebookname.com/product/journalism-studies-the-basics-1st-
edition-martin-conboy/

Textbook of Erectile Dysfunction 2 ■■■■■■■ Edition

Carson C.C. (Ed)

https://ebookname.com/product/textbook-of-erectile-
dysfunction-2-%d0%b8%d0%b7%d0%b4%d0%b0%d0%bd%d0%b8%d0%b5-edition-
carson-c-c-ed/

Critical Reasoning A Practical Introduction 3rd Edition

Anne Thomson

https://ebookname.com/product/critical-reasoning-a-practical-
introduction-3rd-edition-anne-thomson/
The Tao of Deception Unorthodox Warfare in Historic and
Modern China 2007 Ralph D. Sawyer

https://ebookname.com/product/the-tao-of-deception-unorthodox-
warfare-in-historic-and-modern-china-2007-ralph-d-sawyer/
Saving the Modern Soul
Saving the
Modern Soul
Therapy, Emotions, and
the Culture of Self-Help

E va I l l o u z

University of California Press

Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university
presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by
advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural
sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation
and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions.
For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

© 2008 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Illouz, Eva, 1961–.

Saving the modern soul : therapy, emotions, and the culture of
self-help / Eva Illouz.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn: 978-0-520-22446-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn: 978-0-520-25373-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Social values—United States. 2. Psychoanalysis and culture—
United States. 3. Psychotherapy—Social aspects—United States.
4. Emotions—Social aspects—United States. 5. Social norms—
United States. I. Title. II. Title: Culture of self-help.
HN90.M6I35 2007
306.4'613—dc22 2007007631

Manufactured in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

ansi/niso z39.48 –1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
The tragedy of the modern spirit consists in that it has
“solved the enigma of the universe,” only to replace it
with the enigma of itself.

Alexandre Koyre, Newtonian Studies

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Introduction 1
Cultural Sociology and the Therapeutic / 8
Therapy as a New Emotional Style / 12
Texts and Contexts / 16
Cultural Critique and Psychology / 19

2. Freud: A Cultural Innovator 22

Psychoanalysis as a Charismatic Enterprise / 24
The Social Organization of Freudian Charisma / 26
Freud in America / 29
The Freudian Cultural Matrix / 35
The Romance of Psychology and Popular Culture / 51
Conclusion / 56
3. From Homo economicus to Homo communicans 58
Emotional Control in the Sociology of Organizations / 61
The Power of Control and the Control of Power / 64
Psychologists Enter the Market / 66
A New Emotional Style / 72
Emotional Control / 75
The Communicative Ethic as the Spirit of the
Corporation / 88
Emotional, Moral, and Professional Competence / 95
Conclusion / 103

4. The Tyranny of Intimacy 105

Intimacy: An Increasingly Cold Haven / 107
Beyond Their Will? Psychologists and Marriage / 115
What Feminism and Psychology Have in Common / 120
Intimacy: A New Emotional Imagination / 125
Communicative Rationality in the Bedroom / 131
Toward the Ideology of Pure Emotion / 135
The Cooling of Passion / 142
Conclusion / 149

5. Triumphant Suffering 152

Why Therapy Triumphed / 156
The Therapeutic Narrative of Selfhood / 171
Performing the Self through Therapy / 178
A Narrative in Action / 186
Conclusion / 196

6. A New Emotional Stratification? 197

The Rise of Emotional Competence / 200
Emotional Intelligence and Its Antecedents / 202
The Global Therapeutic Habitus and the New Man / 217
Intimacy as a Social Good / 222
Conclusion / 235

7. Conclusion: Institutional Pragmatism in the Study

of Culture 238

Notes 249
Index 287
Acknowledgments

Debts come in many shapes. Some are so large that they extend far
beyond what can be properly expressed in the acknowledgments section
of a book. Such is my debt to Axel Honneth, who invited me to deliver
the 2004 Adorno Lectures and enabled me to present to the wonderfully
argumentative German academic audience the basic arguments of this
book.
I wish to thank several instituations whose support has greatly facili-
tated the writing of this book: the Israel National Science Foundation, the
Shain Institute, and the Research and Development Authority at the He-
brew University of London.
Doyle McCarthy, Jeffrey Praeger, and Charles Smith read and re-
viewed the whole book for the University of California Press and offered
the best kinds of critiques: those that are uncompromising on detail, yet
benevolent in intent.
Thanks to the friends and colleagues who offered pertinent critiques

ix
x Acknowledgments

and illuminating bibliographical references: Boas Shamir, Michal Frenkel,

and Michal Pagis have helped sharpen the arguments in chapters 1 and
3. Special thanks to Nahman Ben-Yehuda and Yoram Bilu, whose friend-
ship and support have made the Byzantine world of academia bearable
and even pleasant.
My deepest thanks go to Lior Flum for his unrelenting help with the
unrewarding task of checking footnotes and bibliographies and to Carol
Kidron for her help in the editing of this book. Shoshanna Finkelmann
was responsible for bringing the book to its final stages and can probably
be credited with helping me maintain a modicum of sanity during that
period. Finally, the superb team at the University of California Press—
Naomi Schneider, Elisabeth Magnus, Marilyn Schwartz, and Valerie
Witte—have dealt with this book in a way that confirms their impeccable
reputation in the field.

This book, as always, is dedicated to my husband and best friend, Elchanan.

ONE Introduction
To be sure, the concept of enlightenment must not be too
restricted methodologically, for, as I understand it, it embraces
more than just logical deduction and empirical verification,
but rather, beyond these two, the will and the ability to
speculate phenomenologically, to empathize, to approach
the limits of reason. . . . Emotions? For all I care, yes. Where
is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion? To
me the opposite seems to be true.
Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task only if it sets
to work with passion.
—Jean Amery

By words one person can make another blissfully happy

or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his
knowledge to his pupils. Words provoke affects and are in
general the means of mutual influence among men.
—Sigmund Freud

Studies and critiques of therapy have steadily accumulated for the past
three decades. Although differing in method and outlook, they agree that
the therapeutic persuasion is quintessentially modern and that it is mod-
ern in what is most disquieting about modernity: bureaucratization, nar-
cissism, the construction of a false self, the control of modern lives by the
state, the collapse of cultural and moral hierarchies, the intense privati-
zation of life caused by capitalist social organization, the emptiness of the

1
2 Saving the Modern Soul

modern self severed from communal relationships, large-scale surveil-

lance, the expansion of state power and state legitimation, and “risk soci-
ety” and the cultivation of the self’s vulnerability.1 Studies of the thera-
peutic discourse alone could provide us with a compendium of the
various themes that make up the sociology (and critique) of modernity.
The communitarian critique of modernity argues that psychology ex-
presses an atomistic individualism that creates or at least encourages the
very ills it claims to heal. Thus, while psychology supposedly addresses
and helps resolve our increasing difficulty in entering or remaining in
social relations, it actually encourages us to put our needs and prefer-
ences above our commitments to others. Under the aegis of the thera-
peutic discourse, social relations are dissolved by a pernicious utilitari-
anism that condones a lack of commitment to social institutions and
legitimizes a narcissistic and shallow identity.2
Commentators such as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch,
and Philip Cushman have interpreted the rise of the therapeutic world-
view as marking the decline of an autonomous realm of culture and val-
ues.3 Thanks to consumption and therapeutic practice, the self has been
smoothly integrated into the institutions of modernity, causing culture to
lose its power of transcendence and opposition to society. The very
seductiveness of consumption and therapeutic self-absorption marks
the decline of any serious opposition to society and the general cultural
exhaustion of Western civilization. No longer capable of creating heroes,
binding values, and cultural ideals, the self has withdrawn inside its
own empty shell. In calling on us to withdraw into ourselves, the thera-
peutic persuasion has made us abandon the great realms of citizenship
and politics and cannot provide us with an intelligible way of linking the
private self to the public sphere because it has emptied the self of its
communal and political content, replacing this content with a narcissis-
tic self-concern.
The most radical and probably the most influential critique of the ther-
apeutic discourse has been inspired by Michel Foucault’s historicization
of systems of knowledge. Foucault’s approach to the therapeutic dis-
course is less interested in restoring communities of meaning than in
exposing the ways that power is woven into the social fabric vertically
 introduction 3

and horizontally. Foucault notoriously unleashed a fatal blow to psycho-

analysis by revealing its glorious project of self-liberation as a form of dis-
cipline and subjection to institutional power “by other means.”4 He has
suggested that the scientific “discovery” of sexuality at the heart of the
psychoanalytical project continues a long tradition in which, through
confession, subjects are made to search and speak the truth about them-
selves. The therapeutic is a site within which we invent ourselves as indi-
viduals, with wants, needs, and desires to be known, categorized, and
controlled for the sake of freedom. Through the twin categories of “sex”
and “the psyche,” psychoanalytical practice makes us look for the truth
about ourselves and is thus defined in terms of discovering that truth and
finding emancipation in the search for it. What makes “psy discourses”5
particularly effective in the modern era is that they make the practice of
self-knowledge a simultaneously epistemological and moral act. Far
from showing the stern face of the censor, modern power takes on the
benevolent face of our psychoanalyst, who turns out to be nothing but a
node in a vast network of power, a network that is pervasive, diffuse, and
total in its anonymity and immanence. The discourse of psychoanalysis
is thus a “political technology of the self,” an instrument used and devel-
oped in the general framework of the political rationality of the state; its
very aim of emancipating the self is what makes the individual manage-
able and disciplined. Where communitarian sociologists view the thera-
peutic discourse as driving a wedge between self and society, Foucault
suggests, on the contrary, that through therapy the self is made to work
seamlessly for and within a system of power.
Although this book cannot fail to have implications for the critique of
modernity, I would like to skirt that critique altogether. Whether the ther-
apeutic discourse threatens moral communities of meaning, undermines
the family, oppresses women, diminishes the relevance of the political
sphere, corrodes moral virtue and character, exerts a general process of
surveillance, reinforces the empty shell of narcissism, and weakens the
self does not preoccupy me—although some of these questions cannot
fail to haunt some of the discussion to follow. My purpose is neither to
document the pernicious effects of the therapeutic discourse nor to dis-
cuss its emancipatory potential, tasks that have been masterfully accom-
4 Saving the Modern Soul

plished by many others.6 My intent here is rather to move the field of cul-
tural studies away from the “epistemology of suspicion” on which it has
too heavily relied. Or, to say this differently, I wish to analyze culture
without presuming to know in advance what social relations should
look like. Using Bruno Latour’s and Michel Callon’s sociological ap-
proach to scientific objects, I call on students of culture to adopt two prin-
ciples: the principle of “agnosticism” (taking an amoral stance toward
social actors) and the principle of symmetry (explaining different phe-
nomena in a similar or symmetrical way).7 The point of cultural analysis
is not to measure cultural practices against what they ought to be or
ought to have been but rather to understand how they have come to be
what they are and why, in being what they are, they “accomplish things”
for people. Thus, despite its brilliance, a Foucauldian approach will not
do because Foucault used sweeping concepts—“surveillance,” “bio-
power,” “governmentality”—that have some fatal flaws: they do not
take the critical capacities of actors seriously; they do not ask why actors
are often deeply engaged by and engrossed with meanings; and they do
not differentiate between social spheres, collapsing them together under
what the French sociologist Philippe Corcuff calls “bulldozer”8 concepts,
concepts so all-encompassing that they end up flattening the complexity
of the social (e.g., “bio-power” or “surveillance”). As I hope to show, it is
crucial to make such differentiations. A thick and contextual analysis of
the uses and effects of therapy reveals that there is no single overall effect
(of “surveillance” or “bio-power”). On the contrary, these uses and effects
significantly differ according to whether they take place in the realm of
the corporation, marriage, or the support group (respectively chapters 3,
4, and 5).
If all the critics of the psychological discourse agree that it has “tri-
umphed” and if some remarkable studies now detail what in the thera-
peutic has “triumphed,”9 we still do not know much about how and why
it has triumphed.10 In addressing this question, I part company with the
critical approaches to culture that rely on the epistemology of suspicion in
their systematic exposure of how a cultural practice accomplishes (or fails
to accomplish) a specific political practice. Instead, I argue that a critique
of culture cannot be adequately waged before we understand the mecha-
 introduction 5

nism of culture: how meanings are produced, how they are woven into
the social fabric, how they are used in daily life to shape relationships and
cope with an uncertain social world, and why they come to organize our
interpretation of self and others. As I hope to show, both the analysis and
the critique of the therapeutic ethos take a new aspect when they are not
predicated on a priori political assumptions about what social relations
should look like. Instead, my analysis subscribes to the pragmatic insight
that meanings and ideas should be viewed as useful tools, that is, as tools
enabling us to accomplish certain things in daily life.11
My study of the therapeutic discourse is thus waged first and foremost
from the vantage point of the sociology of culture. Perhaps more so than
for most other topics, the exploration of the therapeutic ethos is an ideal
site for examining “how culture works.” This is true for several reasons.
First, for the student of culture, therapeutic language has the rare
virtue of being a qualitatively new language of the self. Although it relies
upon an age-old view of the psyche, this language has virtually no ante-
cedent in American or European culture. In that respect, it represents a
uniquely pristine possibility to understand how new cultural forms
emerge and how new languages transform the self-understandings that
infuse social relations and action. Recalling Robert Bellah’s insight re-
garding the Protestant Reformation, we may say that the therapeutic dis-
course has “reformulated the deepest level of identity symbols.”12 Such
reformulation is of particular interest to the cultural sociologist, for it
occurred simultaneously through the specialized and formal channels of
scientific knowledge and through the culture industries (movies, popular
press, publishing industry, television). To the extent that the therapeutic
discourse represents a qualitatively new language of the self, it enables us
to throw in sharp relief the question of the emergence of new cultural
codes and meanings and to inquire into the conditions that make possible
their diffusion and impact throughout society. This book can be read as a
fragment in the broader cultural history of introspection, that is, the his-
tory of the language and techniques we use to address and examine our-
selves (through such categories as “desires,” “memory,” and “emotions”).
Second, no other cultural framework, with the exception of political
liberalism and the market-based language of economic efficiency, has
6 Saving the Modern Soul

exerted such a decisive influence on twentieth-century models of selfhood.

Not only has almost half of the entire population consulted a mental
health practitioner,13 but even more critically the therapeutic outlook has
been institutionalized in various social spheres of contemporary societies
(e.g., in economic organizations; mass media; patterns of child rearing; inti-
mate and sexual relationships; schools; the army; the welfare state; prison
rehabilitation programs; and international conflicts). Therapy under many
forms has been diffused worldwide on a scale that is comparable (and per-
haps even superior) to that of American popular culture. Whether it has
assumed the form of introspective psychoanalysis, a New Age “mind-
body” workshop, or an “assertiveness training” program, it has mustered
a rare level of cultural legitimacy across a wide variety of social groups,
organizations, institutions, and cultural settings. The therapeutic discourse
has crossed and blurred the compartmentalized spheres of modernity and
has come to constitute one of the major codes with which to express,
shape, and guide selfhood. Moreover, through the standardization of aca-
demic curricula and the standardization of psychological professions, the
therapeutic discourse transcends national boundaries and constitutes a
“transnational” language of selfhood. If, as S. N. Eisenstadt put it, civiliza-
tions have centers that diffuse and embody ontological visions,14 the ther-
apeutic outlook has become one of the centers of that amorphous and
vague entity known as Western civilization.
Third, perhaps more than any other cultural formation, the therapeu-
tic discourse illustrates the ways in which culture and knowledge have
become inextricably imbricated in contemporary societies.15 As Karin
Knorr-Cetina put it:

A knowledge society is not simply a society of more experts, of technological

infra- and information structures and of specialist rather than participant
interpretations. It means that knowledge cultures have spilled and woven
their tissue into society, the whole set of processes, experiences and relation-
ships that wait on knowledge and unfold with its articulation. This “dehis-
cence” of knowledge, the discharge of knowledge relations into society, is
what needs to be rendered as a problem to be solved in a sociological (rather
than economic) account of knowledge societies. . . . We need to trace the
ways in which knowledge has become constitutive of social relations.16
 introduction 7

Psychology is undoubtedly a body of texts and theories produced in for-

mal organizations by experts certified to produce and use it. But it is per-
haps primarily also a body of knowledge diffused worldwide through a
wide variety of culture industries; self-help books, workshops, television
talk shows, radio call-in programs, movies, television series, novels, and
magazines have all been essential cultural platforms for the diffusion of
therapy throughout U.S. society and culture. All of the above have been
and continue to be central sites of diffusion of therapeutic knowledge,
making that knowledge an essential part of the cultural and moral uni-
verse of contemporary middle-class Americans. This dual status of psy-
chology as simultaneously professional and popular is what makes it so
interesting for the student of contemporary culture; it offers an opportu-
nity to understand how high and popular culture are saturated through
and through by knowledge formations. Indeed, inasmuch as “knowl-
edges have become decisive forces themselves in our economic and tech-
nological development,”17 they constitute an important aspect of cultural
action in contemporary societies. The diffusion of this knowledge took
place through mass media and multiple institutional arenas, in which
psychological knowledge became a way of performing the self, which in
turn explains why it took hold of definitions of the self in such a long-
lasting and gripping way. Knowledge and symbolic systems have come
to shape who we are because they are enacted within social institutions
that bestow authority on certain ways of knowing and speaking and rou-
tinize them so that they may become the invisible semiotic codes that
organize ordinary conduct and structure the interaction rituals of the self.
This assumption informs the main strategy of this book as it examines
how the therapeutic discourse has been incorporated into different insti-
tutional settings such as the corporation, the family, and ordinary prac-
tices of self-help (examined respectively in chapters 3, 4, and 5) and how
it organizes social relations in each one of these spheres.
Finally, the therapeutic discourse is such a good site for cultural analy-
sis because it has traversed the entire twentieth century, only gaining in
strength and scope. How did the cultural structure of therapy survive
and become reinforced throughout the American twentieth century?
What is the process by which a cultural structure persists and endures?
8 Saving the Modern Soul

As Orlando Patterson argues, cultural continuity needs to be explained,

not simply assumed.18 The extraordinary resilience of the therapeutic dis-
course can be explained not only by its incorporation into central institu-
tions of American society but also by the fact that it has been able to
recruit a vast number of social actors and cultural industries (chapter 5).
For these reasons, I believe the therapeutic discourse is an outstand-
ing, if daunting, object of study for the cultural sociologist. The purpose
of this book, then, is not only to document the various aspects of the ther-
apeutic culture but also to track down the emergence of a new cultural
structure, a task that has been too rarely undertaken by sociologists of cul-
ture.

Cultural Sociology and the Therapeutic

Even if at times cultural sociology may seem to be a hopelessly fuzzy
field, one may identify a number of propositions constitutive of the core
of the discipline. The first is that culture matters a great deal for who we
are. By “who we are” I do not refer to our objectives, interests, or mater-
ial resources. Rather, I refer to the way we make sense of who we are
through actions shaped by values, key images and scenarios, ideals, and
habits of thought; through the stories we use to frame our own and oth-
ers’ experience; through the accounts we use to explain our own and oth-
ers’ failures and successes; through what we feel entitled to; and through
the moral categories we use to hierarchize our social world. Our actions,
narratives, accounts, and moral categories not only help us make sense of
who we are but are central to the way we communicate ourselves to oth-
ers, the way we mobilize their support, what we are ready to defend and
fight for, and how we orient ourselves in the face of ambiguous choices.
As George Steinmetz put it: “Culture is more than a conveyor belt for
deeper, more fundamental, or more material forces.”19 The therapeutic
discourse offers an entirely new cultural matrix—made of metaphors,
binary oppositions, narrative schemas, explanatory frameworks—that
throughout the twentieth century has increasingly shaped our under-
standings of the self and of others. To that extent, it represents an excel-
lent opportunity to demonstrate to sociologists who still need to be con-
vinced the centrality of meaning.20
 introduction 9

The second proposition made by cultural sociology is that meanings

differ in their ability to constrain definitions of reality: some meanings
are more powerful and binding than others.21 Traditionally, the sociology
of culture has been interested in meanings that have had a great deal of
institutional resonance, that is, meanings that are sanctioned by and
enacted within powerful institutional frameworks. (“Individualism” is a
good example of a meaning that has enormous institutional resonance in
the sense that it is enacted in and sanctioned by a variety of institutions.)
The study of culture is usually interested in meanings that are enacted in
and through powerful institutional settings because these meanings are
assumed to be more constraining and because they are most visibly con-
nected to the social order. Contrary to the view (widespread among com-
munitarian sociologists) that the therapeutic ethos privileges an anti-
institutional and narcissistic self,22 I argue that the therapeutic discourse
has mustered an enormous cultural resonance because it has been en-
acted within and through the main institutions of modernity. Far from
instilling an anti-institutional attitude, the therapeutic discourse repre-
sents a formidably powerful and quintessentially modern way to institu-
tionalize the self.23
The third characteristic claim made by the sociology of culture is that
culture does not cause our actions in the same way that the wind causes
a leaf to fall from the tree. Even if many students of culture strive to iden-
tify those cultural variables that have an independent causal power, most
of us working in the muddy field of culture view culture as so entangled
with “the rest” that positivist causal models are, if not undesirable, at
least uneasy. Indeed, what is taken to be the explanatory variable must,
more often than not, itself be explained.24 We may compare the relation-
ship that culture entertains with society to the relationship between the
rain and the soil on which it falls: even if we know that the rain has
caused the soil to be wet, we are, more often than not, left only with
“mud” that cannot be reseparated into soil and water. Similarly, while I
try to trace the historical moment during which the therapeutic discourse
progressively shaped the language of selfhood, it is now virtually impos-
sible to isolate this language from other “master cultural” codes organiz-
ing selfhood, such as that of economic liberalism or contractual law. The
challenge is thus to understand how culture constitutes social relations
10 Saving the Modern Soul

without ever being completely autonomous from them.25 The therapeutic

discourse helps make a strong case for the claim that language is central
to the constitution of selfhood in that it is a dynamic means of experienc-
ing and expressing emotions. Language defines categories of emotions,
establishes what an “emotional problem” is, provides causal frameworks
and metaphors to make sense of these problems, and constrains the ways
emotions are expressed, made sense of, and managed.26
The fourth characteristic of cultural sociology is its attempt to system-
atically find connections (which are not reducible to causality) between
meaning and social groups, whether as producers, carriers, or consumers
of meanings. The connection between social location or material interests
on the one hand and ideas, values, and beliefs on the other cannot be
deterministic and mechanistic. However, it is and remains a vital task of
the sociology of culture to identify the social carriers of ideas and sym-
bols, even if this relation cannot be conceived of in a causal and deter-
ministic way. What complicates such an inquiry, however, is the fact that
the therapeutic discourse is a set of linguistic practices with a strong insti-
tutional base (it originates in university departments, research institutes,
professional journals); it emanates from the professional class of psychol-
ogists and has found a particularly receptive audience among members
of the new middle classes and among women; but it is also an anony-
mous, authorless, and pervasive worldview, scattered in a dazzling array
of social and cultural locations (TV talk shows, the Internet, the publish-
ing industry, the private practice of clinicians, business consulting, school
curricula, prison training programs, social welfare services, and a
plethora of support groups). In Lionel Trilling’s words, the therapeutic
discourse has become the “slang of our culture.”27 The therapeutic dis-
course is thus both a formal knowledge system that has distinct bound-
aries and rules of writing, is produced in formal organizations, and is car-
ried through professional networks, especially through “knowledge
producers,”28 and an informal, amorphous, and diffuse cultural system
present in ordinary cultural practices and self-understandings. Although
this book focuses on the latter system, I try to stress the connections
between the two realms.
To these four dimensions defining culture, with which, I believe, most
 introduction 11

sociologists of culture would agree, I offer one or two additional dimen-

sions of my own, unfortunately neglected by the sociology of culture.
Cultural sociology has surprisingly failed to devote serious attention to
what is perhaps the central missing link connecting structure and agency,
namely emotion.
Emotion is the inner energy that propels us toward an act, just as it
endows a particular “mood” or “coloration” to that act.29 Emotion can
thus be defined as the “energy-laden” side of action, where that energy is
understood to simultaneously implicate cognition, affect, evaluation,
motivation, and the body. Far from being presocial or precultural, emo-
tions are cultural meanings and social relationships that are closely and
inextricably compressed together, and it is this tight compression that
gives them their capacity to energize action. What makes emotion embed
this “energy” is that it always concerns the self and the relationship of the
self to culturally situated others. Emotions originate in the subject’s
beliefs and desires and cannot be separated from the ways in which cul-
turally encoded social relationships are lived in and by the self. When
someone says, “You are late again,” whether this provokes shame, anger,
or guilt will depend almost exclusively on one’s relationship to the per-
son who said it. A boss’s remark about being late is likely to be shaming,
and a colleague’s is likely to make one angry, but that of one’s child wait-
ing at school is likely to make one feel guilty. Emotion is certainly a psy-
chological entity, but it is no less and is perhaps more a cultural and social
entity: through emotion we enact cultural definitions of personhood as
they are expressed in concrete and immediate but always culturally and
socially defined relationships. The intense, compact compression of cul-
tural meanings and social relationships also gives emotions their prere-
flexive, often semiconscious character. Emotions are deeply internalized
and unreflexive aspects of action, not because they do not contain suffi-
cient culture and society, but because they contain too much of them. For
this reason, a hermeneutic sociology that aims to understand social
action from “within” must pay attention to the emotional coloration or
intonation of action because that is what actually propels it. Like religion,
the therapeutic discourse offers symbols that create an overriding expe-
riential reality and transform the very nature of action.30 To account for
12 Saving the Modern Soul

such experiential reality, we need to bring in emotions. I therefore sub-

scribe to the view of culture as practice expressed in the words of Richard
Biernacki: “Thinking and feeling are not preparations for action, they are
action.”31 Essential to my approach to culture is the pragmatic claim that
meanings help solve practical problems in which emotional life figures
prominently.
This book examines the way the language of therapy has reformulated
the “deepest level of identity symbols”32 by viewing the therapeutic dis-
course simultaneously as a formal and specialized body of knowledge
and as a cultural framework that orients self-perceptions and concep-
tions of others and generates specific emotional practices. It has become
virtually impossible to disentangle “knowledge” from “culture,” so a
dual approach to the therapeutic discourse is necessary: because it is both
an established body of scientific knowledge conveyed through formal
institutions and a language through which selfhood, identity, and emo-
tional life are shaped,33 it demands that we mobilize and reconcile the
“production of culture” approach (which explains the emergence of cul-
tural material by examining the resources, organizations, and networks
that agents mobilize) and the hermeneutic approach (which views cul-
ture as a set of meanings deeply encoded in conceptions of personhood).

Therapy as a New Emotional Style

Many will object to my unrestricted use of the word therapeutic, a use that
includes eclectic objects such as the demanding practice of the “talking
cure,” commercial self-help books that are manufactured for quick-fix
mental health, support groups, assertiveness training programs, and the
television programs that provide “one-show” therapeutic counseling.
The objection is serious and demands that we pause to consider whether
the enterprise might include so many eclectic elements that the object of
analysis dissolves.
Akin to religious ideas—which at times may originate in the special-
ized discussions of theologians—concepts that are elaborated in the spe-
cialized and professional arenas of scientists shape our ordinary under-
standings of our social and natural environment. This observation is
 introduction 13

especially pertinent to the science of clinical psychology, which has taken

on the vocation of defining concepts (such as “intimacy,” “sexuality,” or
“leadership”) that are at the interface between specialized institutions of
knowledge and ordinary cultural practices. In suggesting a continuity
between “professional” and popular psychology, I perform the same
move that cultural studies does when it argues that highbrow literature
and popular culture are equally revealing of the social conditions in
which they are produced. Similarly, I argue that the boundary between
specialized psychological knowledge and so-called pop psychology is
porous in that both the professional language of psychology and its pop-
ular version address the self using similar metaphors and narratives.34
This does not mean that I call for a disregard of the differences in the
complexity of different cultural forms or that I am oblivious to the real
differences that separate the painstaking (and costly) therapeutic consul-
tation from the commodified quick-fix advice offered by self-help litera-
ture or workshops. But while we must acknowledge the discontinuities
between the various organizational frameworks in which a language is
deployed, we sociologists cannot accept at face value the “distinctions”
guarded by professional practitioners in a given field. Such distinctions—
between formal and informal knowledge—must be systematically
examined, questioned, and even bracketed if we want to grasp the cul-
tural continuities that exist beyond the established social divisions of
knowledge.
There is another and perhaps more convincing reason justifying the
seemingly cavalier move of blurring the specialized highbrow language
of therapists and the language of popular culture. Starting with Freud
himself (see next chapter), a significant number of professional psychol-
ogists have easily and happily crossed the boundary dividing specialized
knowledge and popular culture and in fact have preferred to be located
at the seam line between the two. For example, in the preface to his
widely read book On Becoming a Person, Carl Rogers, the famous founder
of humanist psychology, framed his enterprise in a way reminiscent of
popular self-help guides: “It is my sincere hope that many people who
have no particular interest in the field of counseling or psychotherapy
will find that the learnings emerging in this field will strengthen them in
14 Saving the Modern Soul

their own living.”35 Other popular books written by prominent psychol-

ogists, such as Aaron Beck’s Love Is Never Enough or Albert Ellis’s A New
Guide to Rational Living, suggest similarly that well-known professional
psychologists wanted to address the wide public as an undifferentiated
mass of consumers of the publishing industry.36 Conversely but symmet-
rically, many popular best-sellers present themselves as transcripts of
therapeutic professional work. Countless self-help books have been writ-
ten by certified therapists who share with a broad audience specialized
insight they have gained in the course of their work, bringing case stud-
ies and even therapy transcripts to their readers.37
In fact, from the very beginning of their profession, American profes-
sional psychoanalysts and psychologists turned to the culture industries
to make their voice heard far and loud. By breaking down the distinction
between the talking cure and the self-help book, I hope to show that the
different cultural realms of professional and popular therapy are united
by a common emotional style.
What is an “emotional style”? In her well-known Philosophy in a New
Key, Suzanne Langer suggests that “every age in the history of philoso-
phy has its own preoccupation. . . . If we look back on the slow formation
and accumulation of doctrines which mark that history, we may see cer-
tain groupings of ideas within it, not by subject matter, but by a subtler
common factor which may be called their ‘technique.’ It is the mode of
handling problems, rather than what they are about, that assigns them to
an age.”38 I call here emotional style the combination of the ways a culture
becomes “preoccupied” with certain emotions and devises specific “tech-
niques”—linguistic, scientific, ritual—to apprehend them.39
An emotional style is established when a new “interpersonal imagi-
nation” is formulated, that is, a new way of thinking about the relation-
ship of self to others, imagining its potentialities and implementing them
in practice. Indeed, interpersonal relationships—like the nation—are
thought of, longed for, argued over, betrayed, fought for, and negotiated
according to imaginary scripts that fill social closeness or distance with
meaning. Thus, as I show in chapter 2, Freud’s greatest impact on culture
has been to reformulate the relationship of the self to others through a
new way of imagining the past (i.e., the personal familial past) and a
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
hatching the eggs while I am with you, and we will stay near enough
for her to see how fast you learn.”
You can imagine how excited the young Robins were then. They
talked so much that day that not one of them took a nap, and if
their mother had not insisted upon it, they would not have quieted
down at sunset.
Early the next morning their parents helped them to the ground.
First they tumbled, fluttered, and sprawled to the porch roof below
the nest. Then when they had rested, they tumbled, fluttered, and
sprawled to the tops of the sweetbriar bushes underneath. There
they clung until after breakfast, while their father hunted for them
and their mother sat on the eggs above. If they had not been taught
to mind, it would have been much harder. As it was, when their
parents said, “Flutter your wings! Get ready! Fly!” they did the very
best they could at once. And that is exactly the way children must
do if they wish to grow strong and help themselves.
There never were such plump, cheerful, and obedient little Robins as
these. Their father had them stay in the lower branches of the fir
tree, within sight of the nest, and the mother watched them while
he was hunting, and called down comforting things to them. When
they had tumbles in trying to fly, she would say: “Never mind! Pick
yourselves up! Robins must tumble before they can fly. After awhile,
when I have finished hatching these eggs, you can come right up to
this window ledge and see the babies.”
Then the little Robins would try harder than ever, for they were
already proud of the babies to be hatched, since they had helped
keep the eggs warm.
Sometimes Silvertip would stroll around the corner of the house, and
Mrs. Robin would be so scared that she could hardly scream “Cat!”
Yet she always managed to do it in some way, and all the other
Robins would help her. Then the Lady, who was almost always
writing or sewing at the sitting-room window, within sight of the
nest, would drop her work and run out the nearest door, pick up
Silvertip, and carry him inside. There he would stand, with his nose
pressed against the screen and his tail switching angrily.
The Lady seemed to understand Robins. When they only cried
“Trouble!” she did not move, knowing it was something she could
not help, but when they cried, “Cat! Cat!” she always hurried out.
Sometimes, though, it was the Gentleman who came, and
sometimes the Little Boy. Mrs. Robin often said that she was sure
she could never raise children so well in any other place as here, in
spite of Silvertip’s being around.
Every day the young Robins were larger and stronger, and their tail-
feathers were better grown. When at last the joyful time came for
the two babies to chip the shell, every one of the four children
managed to get up to the window ledge to see them. It was a hard
trip, and they had to try and try again, and rest between times. They
were not all there at once, but oh, it was a happy, happy time!
The mother told the babies how their big brothers and sisters had
helped hatch them, and the father told the mother how beautifully
she had managed everything. Then the mother told him how
faithfully he had worked, and they both told the older children how
proud they were of them. Everybody said lovely things to everybody
else, and the best part of it was that all these lovely things were
true.
The babies were too little to talk much, but they stretched their
necks up lovingly and sleepily to all the family, and acted as though
they really understood how many people had been loving and
working for them, even before they were hatched.
THE SPARROWS INSIDE THE EAVES

O NE does not like to say such things, but the English Sparrows
were very disagreeable people. And they are very disagreeable
people. Also, they always have been, and probably always will be,
very disagreeable people. They were the first birds to make trouble
among neighbors anywhere around the big house. If it had not been
that the Gentleman who lived there was so very tender-hearted,
their nests would probably have been poked down with poles long
before the eggs could have been laid in them. When Boys came
around with little rifles and ugly looking bags slung over their
shoulders, they were always ordered away and told that the
Gentleman would have no shooting near his house.
It is not strange then that the woodbine was full of Sparrows’ nests,
and that many of the evergreens also bore them in their top
branches. One had even been tucked in behind a conductor pipe,
and their owners hunted and argued and fussed all over the place.
There was just one way in which the English Sparrows were not
cared for like other birds around the big house. Silvertip was allowed
to eat all that he could catch. And you may be very sure that no
Robin ever called “Cat!” when he was ready to spring upon a
Sparrow.
“It may be wrong,” said one Robin mother, “but I cannot do it. I
remember too well how they have robbed my nests and quarrelled
with my friends. I say that they must care for their own children.
And if they do not—well, so much the better for Silvertip!”
You see that the birds were not angry at Silvertip for trying to eat
them. It was all to be expected, as they knew very well. It was not
pleasant, but it had to be, just as Worms and Flies had to expect to
be eaten, unless they were clever enough to keep out of the way of
birds. Only the quickest and strongest could live, so of course all the
young ones tried hard to become quick and strong.
When Miss Sparrow, from the nest behind the conductor pipe, was
old enough to marry, she had many lovers, and that was quite
natural. She was a plump and trim-looking bird, and pretty, too, if
one came close enough to her. Her feathers were gray and brown,
with a little white and black in places. Her bill was black, and her
feet were brown. She was very careful to keep clean, and although
she had to hunt food in the mud of the street, she bathed often in
fine dust and kept her wings and tail well up. Her lovers were
dressed in the same colors, but with more decided markings.
Her parents were very clever to think of building where they did;
and because they had such a large nest and so near the eaves of
the house, they were much looked up to by the other Sparrows.
They were very proud of their home, and especially on days when
the water running down the pipe made a sweet guggle-guggle-
guggling sound. Sparrows like noise, you know, and this always
amused the children and kept them quiet on rainy days.
All the young Sparrows who were not already in love, and a few who
were, began to court Miss Sparrow as soon as it was known that she
cared to marry. This was partly on her own account, and partly
because of her distinguished family.
Some birds would have waited for their suitors to speak first about
marriage. Miss Sparrow did not. The Sparrows are not very well
bred. “Of course I am going to marry,” she said. “I am only waiting
to make up my mind whom I will choose.”
They flocked around her as she fed in the dust of the road, all
talking at once in their harsh voices. When a team passed by, and
that was not often, they flew or hopped aside at the last minute.
When they settled down again there was always a squabble to see
who should be next to Miss Sparrow. Her lovers fought with each
other over choice seeds, but they let Miss Sparrow have everything
she wished. She always seemed very cross when her lovers were
around (as well as most of the time when they were not), and often
scolded and pecked at them. Sometimes one who was not brave,
and would not stand pain, flew away and began courting somebody
else.
After a while she had driven away so many that only two were left.
She flew at these, striking first one and then the other, until, brave
as they were, one went away. Then she turned to the suitor who
was left with a sweet smile. “I will marry you,” she said.
His wings were lame from her fighting him, his head smarted where
she had picked at it, and two or three small feathers were missing
from his breast. Miss Sparrow was certainly a strong bird, and he
knew that anybody who wanted her would have to stand just what
he had stood. He would have preferred to court as the Goldfinches
and Wrens do, by singing to their sweethearts, but that could not
be. In the first place, he could not sing, and in the second place she
would not have taken him until she had beaten him anyway. It
would have been more fun for him to fight some of the other birds
and let the winner have her, yet that could not be done either. If he
wanted to marry, he had to marry an English Sparrow, and if he
wanted to marry an English Sparrow he had to go about it in her
way. It would have been just the same if he had courted her sister
or her cousin.
The truth is that, although the Sparrow husbands swagger and brag
a great deal and act as though they owned everything in sight, there
is not one whose wife does not order him around. Miss Sparrow
would not have taken him if she had not made sure that she could
whip him.
“What do I need of a husband,” she said, “unless he will mind me?
And when I feel crosser than usual I want somebody always near
and at home, where I can treat him as I choose. That is what I care
for in a home.”
“Now,” she said, “if you are to be my husband, I will show you
where we are to build.”
Mr. Sparrow flew meekly along after her. You would be meek with
lame wings, a sore head, and three feathers off from your breast.
She led the way to the front west porch, where the syringa shoots
made a little hedge around it and a tall fir tree made good perching
places beside it.
“Where are we going to build?” asked Mr. Sparrow. He saw plenty of
good window ledges and places which would do for Robins and
Phœbes and other birds who plaster their nests. Yet he did not see a
single corner or big crack where a Sparrow’s nest could be made to
hold together.
“I will show you,” answered Mrs. Sparrow. She perched on the top of
a porch column and looked up at a small round hole nearly over her
head. It was the place where a conductor pipe had once run through
the cornice. Now the pipe had been taken away and the opening
was left. She gave an upward spring and flutter and went straight up
through the hole. “Come up!” she cried in the most good-natured
way. “Come up! This is the best place I ever saw. Our nest will be all
hidden, and no large bird or Squirrel can possibly get in. The rain
can never fall on it, and on cold days we shall be warm and snug.”
She did not ask him what he thought of it, and he did not expect her
to. So he just said, “It is a most unusual place.”
“That is what I think,” she replied. “Very unusual, and I would not
build in the woodbine like some Sparrows. No, indeed! One who has
been brought up in style beside a water-pipe, as I was, could never
come down to woodbine. It should not be expected.”
“I’m sure it was not, my dear,” said her husband.
“Very well,” said she. “Since you like this place so much, we may as
well call it settled and keep still about it until we are ready to build.”
Mr. Sparrow had not said that he liked it, yet he knew better than to
tell her so. If he did, she might leave him even now for one of her
other lovers. He really dreaded getting out through that hole, and let
her go while he watched her. She went head first, clinging to the
rough edges of the hole with both feet, let go with one, hung and
twisted around until she was headed right, then dropped and flew
away. Mr. Sparrow did the same, but he did not like it.
After a while they began nest-building, and all the straws, sticks, and
feathers had to be dragged up through the little round doorway to
the nest. Mrs. Sparrow did most of the arranging, while her husband
flew in and out more than a hundred times a day. She was a worker.
Any bird will tell you that. Still, you know, there are different ways of
working. Some of the people who do the most work make the least
fuss. Mrs. Sparrow was not one of these. When she did a thing, she
wanted everybody to know it, and since her building-place was
hidden she talked all the more to Mr. Sparrow.
“I am going to have a large nest,” she said. “So bring plenty of stuff.
Bring good things, too,” she added. “You have brought two straws
already that were really dirty, and this last stick isn’t fit to use. I will
push it back into a corner.”
Mr. Sparrow would have liked to tell her what hard work his was,
and ask her to use things he brought, even if they were not quite
what she wanted. He was too wise for this, however, so he flew out
and pitched into another Sparrow who was getting straws for his
wife. He tried to steal his straw, and they fought back and forth until
their wives came to see what was the matter and began fighting
also. When they stopped at last, the straw had been carried away by
a Robin, so neither had it. But they had had a lovely, loud, rough
fight, and Sparrows like that even better than straw, so they all felt
good-natured again.
Twice Mrs. Sparrow decided to move her nest a little this way or a
little that, and such a litter as she made when doing it! Some of the
best sticks fell down through the doorway, and the Lady swept them
off the porch. Then Mrs. Sparrow scolded her. She was not afraid of
a Lady. “She might have left them there,” she said. “I would have
had my husband pick them up soon. Yesterday she had the Maid put
some of her own horrid chairs and tables out here while they were
cleaning, and I never touched them.”
Mr. Sparrow flew up with a fine Turkey feather. “It came from the
Lady’s duster,” he said. “I think it will give quite an air to your nest.”
“Excellent!” cried his wife. “Just wait until I get ready for it.” He
clung patiently by one foot to the doorway. When that was tired he
changed to the other. When that was tired he perched on the top of
the column. He was very hungry, and he saw some grain dropped
from a passing wagon.
“Hurry up, my dear!” he called. “It is past my dinner-time already.”
“Wait until supper then,” cried his wife. “As if I hadn’t enough to do
without thinking about your dinner! Don’t let go of it or it will be
blown away.”
Then Mr. Sparrow lost his temper. He stuck that feather into a crack
near by, and flew softly away to eat some grain. He thought he
might be back in time to carry in the feather and his wife never
know where he had been. Unfortunately, he got to talking and did
not hear his wife call him.
“Mr. Sparrow!” said she. “Mr. Sparrow! I am ready for that feather.”
When he did not answer, she put her head out of the doorway.
There was the Turkey feather stuck into a crack, and in the road
beyond was her husband eating happily with several of his friends.
She looked very angry and opened her bill to speak. Then she
changed her mind and flew quietly off the other way. She went
straight to the Horse-block, where another old suitor was, the one
who had come so near winning her. “Mr. Sparrow has disobeyed
me,” she said, “and is actually eating his dinner when he should be
waiting by the nest to help me. I believe that I ought to have
married you, but better late than never. Come now.”
This was how it happened that when Mr. Sparrow’s stomach was
quite full, and he suddenly remembered his work, he flew back and
found the Turkey feather gone. In the eaves overhead he heard Mrs.
Sparrow telling somebody else what to do. He tried to force his way
up there. Every time he was shoved back, and not very gently either.
“You might better look for another home,” said Mrs. Sparrow’s voice.
“I have found another husband, one who will help me as I wish.
Good-by.”
That was the ending of Mr. Sparrow’s first marriage. It was a very
sad affair, and the birds talked of nothing else for a long time
afterward. Some said that it served him exactly right, because he
married to get into a fine family, when there were dozens of Sparrow
daughters much prettier and nicer than the one he chose. There
may have been something in this, for certainly if Mrs. Sparrow had
not been so sure of finding another to take his place, she would not
have turned him out in the way she did. It is said, however, that her
second husband had a hard life of it.
 A RAINY DAY ON THE LAWN

W HEN the sun rose, that morning late in April, he tried and
tried to look at the big house and see what was happening. All
he could see was a thick gray cloud veil stretched between him and
the earth, and, shine as hard as he might, not a single sunbeam
went through that veil.
When the Blackbirds awakened, they found a drizzling rain falling,
and hurried on their waterproofs to get ready for a wet time.
Blackbirds are always handsome, yet they never look better than
when it rains. They coat their feathers with oil from the pockets
under their tails, as indeed all birds do, and then they fly to the high
branches of some tall and swaying tree and talk and talk and talk
and talk. They do not get into little groups and face each other, but
scatter themselves around and face the wind. This is most sensible,
for if one of them were to turn his back to the wind, it would rumple
up his feathers and give the raindrops a chance to get down to his
skin. When they speak, or at least when they have anything really
important to say, they ruffle their own feathers and stand on tip-toe,
but they ruffle them carefully and face the wind all the time.
When the Robins opened their round eyes, they chirped cheerfully to
each other and put on their waterproofs. “Good weather for us,”
they said. “It will make fine mud for plastering our new nests, and it
will bring out the Worms.”
The English Sparrows, Goldfinches, and other seed-eaters were not
made happy by the rain. With them it was only something to be
borne patiently and without complaining. The Hummingbirds found
fewer fresh blossoms open on cloudy days, and so had to fly farther
and work harder for their food. The Pewees and other fly-catchers
oiled their feathers and kept steadily at work.
 “O MOTHER, IT IS RAINING!”

The birds had not awakened so early as usual, because it was

darker. They had hardly got well started on their breakfast before a
sleepy little face appeared at the window of the big house and a
sleepy little voice called out: “O Mother, it is raining! I didn’t want it
to rain.”
“Foolish! Foolish! Foolish!” chirped the Robins on the lawn. “Boys
would know better than to say such things if they were birds.”
“Boys are a bother, anyway,” said an English Sparrow, as he
spattered in the edge of a puddle. “I wish they had never been
hatched.”
“Ker-eeeee!” said a Blackbird above his head. “I suppose they may
be of some use in the world. I notice that the Gentleman and the
Lady seem to think a great deal of this one, and they are a very
good sort of people.”
“I’d like them better if they didn’t keep a Cat,” said his brother.
“Their Cat is the greatest climber I ever saw. He came almost to the
top of this maple after me yesterday, and I have seen him go clear
to the eaves of the big house on the woodbine.”
“That is because the Sparrows live there,” said Mr. Wren. “He went
to see their children. Silvertip says that he is very fond of children—
they are so much more tender than their parents.” Mr. Wren could
laugh about this because his own children were always safely
housed. Besides, you know, he had reason to dislike Sparrows.
“I would not stay here,” said a Sparrow who had just come up, “if
the people here were not of the right sort. They have mountain ash
trees and sweetbrier bushes where birds find good feeding. And in
the winter that Boy throws out bread crumbs and wheat for us.”
“Humph!” said the Oldest Blackbird. “There is no need of talking so
much about it. You can always tell what sort of people live in a place
by seeing if they have a bird-house. If they have, and it is a sensible
one, where a bird could live comfortably, they are all right.”
After that the birds worked more and talked less, for the Oldest
Blackbird, while he was often grumpy and sometimes cross, was
really a very sensible bird, and what he had said was true. The
Robins went here and there over the lawn in quick, short runs,
pausing once in a while with their heads bent forward and then
pulling up choice Worms to eat. Some of their mouthfuls were half
as long as they, but that was not rude in Robins. What they insist on
in bringing up their children is that mouthfuls should not be too
broad, and that they should not stop swallowing until all the Worm is
out of sight.
The Blackbirds hunted in a more dignified way. They never ran after
food, or indeed after anything else. “If walking is not fast enough,”
the Blackbird mothers say, “then fly, but do not run.” They walked in
parties over the lawn and waggled their heads at each step. When
they found Grubs they did not appear greedy, yet never a Grub
escaped.
“There are two ways of hurrying,” they often said. “One is the jerky
way and the other is our way, of being sure and steady. Of course
our way is the better. You will see that we do just as much and make
less fuss.”
Silvertip came to the edge of the porch and looked around. He was
licking his lips, and every bird on the lawn was happy to see that, for
it meant that he had just finished his breakfast. His eyes gleamed
and his tail waved stiffly as he saw the fat Robins so near. He even
crouched down and took four short steps, quivering his body and
trying his muscles. Then he remembered how wet the grass was and
turned back with a long sigh. After all, his stomach was full and he
could afford to wait until the grass was dry. The Robins would be
there then, and if they kept on eating Worms at this rate, they would
be growing plump and juicy all the time. He began to lick himself all
over, as every truly tidy Cat does after eating. By the time he had
finished the tip of his tail he was sleepy, so he went into the kitchen
and dozed by the fire.
The front door opened with a bang, and the Little Boy stood there,
shouting and waving a piece of red paper with a string tied to it.
“See my kite!” he cried. “Whee-ee-ee!”
Five birds who had been feeding near flew off in wild alarm. “Now
why did he do that?” asked one, after they had settled down
elsewhere. Nobody answered. None but Little Boys understand these
things, and even they do not always tell.
The Lady came to the door behind him and helped him start away.
He proudly carried a small new umbrella, and the precious kite
fluttered out behind him. When he was outside the gate, he peeped
through it and called back: “Good-by, Mother! I’m going to school to
learn everyfing. I’ll be a good Boy. Good-by!” Then he ran down the
walk with the umbrella held back over his shoulder and the rain
falling squarely in his face. All that the birds could see of the Little
Boy then was his fat legs bobbing along below the umbrella.
“There!” said all the birds together. “There! Silvertip is asleep and
the Little Boy has gone to school. Now we can take comfort.”

When the morning was nearly past, and the birds felt so safe that
they had grown almost careless, Silvertip wakened and felt hungry.
He walked slowly out of the kitchen door and looked at the grass.
The sun was now shining, and it was no longer sparkling with tiny
drops. He crept down the steps and around to a place under a big
spruce tree, the lower branches of which lay along the ground. A fat
Robin was hunting near by.
Silvertip watched her hungrily, and if you were a Cat you might have
done exactly the same thing. So you must not blame Silvertip. He
was creeping, creeping, creeping nearer, and never looking away
from her, when the Little Boy came tramping across the grass. He
had come in by the gate of the driveway, and was walking straight
toward Silvertip, who neither saw nor heard him.
Then the Little Boy saw what was happening, and dropped his bright
paper chain on the grass beside him. “G’way!” he cried, waving his
umbrella. “G’way! Don’t you try to eat any birds ’round here. My
father doesn’t ’low it. G’way! G’way! Else I’ll tell my mother that you
are a bad Cat.”
Silvertip fled under the porch, the Robin flew up onto the snowball
bush, and all around the birds sang the praises of the good Little
Boy with the umbrella. But the Little Boy didn’t know this. He stood
by the porch and dangled his pretty paper chain until Silvertip
forgave him and came out to play. Then they ran together into the
house, and the birds heard him shouting, “Mother! Mother! Where
are you? I want to give Silvertip some cream. He is so very hungry
that he most had to eat up a Robin, only I wouldn’t let him.”
 THE PERSISTENT PHŒBE

IT is not often that a Phœbe will nest anywhere except near

running water, and nobody but the Phœbes themselves will ever
know why this pair chose to build under a porch of the big house.
When they came there on their wedding trip the other birds
supposed that they were only visiting, and it was not until a Catbird
heard them discussing different porches that any one really believed
they might come there to live.
Mrs. Phœbe was eager to begin at once, and could not pass a soft
bit of moss or an unusually good blade of grass without stopping to
look it over and think how she could weave it in. “I see no use in
waiting,” said she. “I know just as much about building now as I
shall after a while, and I should like a home of my own. It makes my
bill fairly tingle to see all these fine grasses and mosses waiting to
be used. And the worst of it is,” she added, “that if we wait, some
other bird may get them instead.”
Mr. Phœbe wanted to think it over a little longer. He was older than
his wife and had been married before. “Phœbe!” he would exclaim.
“Wait a day. You know we are building by a house to please you,
now wait one more day to please me.”
That, you see, was quite right and perfectly fair, for it is not fair for
one person to decide everything in a family, and it was right for the
wife to wait as long as she could. She could not, of course, wait
many days, for there were eggs to be laid, and when it was time for
them, the nest had to be ready. Mr. Phœbe knew this and wasted no
time.
“We cannot build on a rock,” said he, “because there are no rocks
here, and we cannot build under a bridge because there is no bridge
here. My other wife and I lived under a bridge.” Then he stood silent
for a long time and looked down at his black feet. When he spoke of
his first wife he always seemed sad. The second Mrs. Phœbe had
not liked this at first, but he was so good and kind to her, and let her
have her own way so much more than some husbands would, that
she had begun to feel happier about it.
There is reason to think that she chose an unusual nesting-place just
to see how far she could coax him out of his old ways. Perhaps, too,
she thought that there would be less in such a place to remind him
of his first wife. Another thing which had made her come to feel
differently was remembering that if he died or left her she would
marry again. Then, you know, she might want to think and talk
about her first husband.
She was very proud of him, and watched him as he stood thinking.
His upper feathers were deep brown, his under ones a dingy white,
and the outer edges of some of his tail-feathers were light colored.
His most beautiful features were his black bill and feet and the crest
which he could raise on the top of his head. Mrs. Phœbe had the
same coloring as her husband, yet she always insisted that he was
the better looking of the two, while he insisted, as a good and wise
husband should, that she was by far the handsomer.
Now Mr. Phœbe was speaking. “We have decided to build on this
house,” said he, “and under a porch. Still, there are four large ones
and we must find out which is the best. You feed on the shady side
and I will feed on the sunny side of the house. Then we shall see
how much these people use their porches.”
“I’ll do it,” answered his wife, “but isn’t it a pity that there are people
living in this house? It would be so much pleasanter if it were
empty.”
Mrs. Phœbe perched on a maple branch on the shady side and
watched two porches. She thought she would like the front one the
better, and had already chosen her window ledge, when she noticed
a pair of English Sparrows dragging straws and feathers toward it
and disappearing inside the cornice. “Not there,” she said firmly, as
she clutched the branch even more tightly with her pretty black feet.
“I will not have quarrelsome neighbors, and I could never bring our
children up to be good if the young Sparrows were always near,
showing them how to be naughty.” Then she darted after a Fly,
caught and swallowed him, and was back on her perch.
“I wonder how the back one would do?” she said. “There are no
steps leading to it, and those sweetbrier bushes all around it would
keep Boys from climbing onto the railing.”
She flew near and saw the Maid kneading bread by one window. A
door stood open into the big kitchen, and through two other
windows she could look into a pleasant dining-room. “I wouldn’t
mind that,” she said. “If I have plenty to eat myself, I would just as
soon see other people eating. We like different things anyway. I dare
say those people never tasted an insect in their lives and do not
even know the flavor of a choice Fly.” Then she swallowed a careless
Bug who had mistaken her for an English Sparrow and flown when
he should have stayed hidden. Mrs. Phœbe was much interested in
the nest, but not so much as to let an insect escape. Oh, never so
much as that!
Mr. Phœbe watched the back porch on his side. Some Robins were
building on a window-ledge there, which he thought exceeding
imprudent. But then he was not surprised, for everybody knows how
careless Robins are. That is why so many of them have to leave their
nests—because they are built where no nest should be. Mr. Phœbe
could tell at a glance that no bird should build there. Woodbine
climbed over the pillars and fell in a thick curtain from the cornice,
and beside the door stood a saucerful of milk. “That means a Cat,”
said he, “a Cat who stays on this porch most of the time and always
comes here when he is hungry. And when he tires of milk he will
climb up that woodbine and finish with young Robin. Or, perhaps,”
he added, “I should say that he will finish a young Robin.”
The front porch on his side was sunshiny and quiet, but there was
the woodbine again, and with the Cat so near. He next looked at the
portico over the front door. Under the roof of this was a queer shiny,
thin thing with a loop of black thread hanging down in it. He tried to
get the thread, but only hit and hurt his bill against the shiny, thin
stuff. Then he remembered seeing a bright light in it the night before
when he had been awakened by a bad dream. “That will never do,”
he said. “It is not good for children to sleep with a light near. One
would want to be catching insects there, too,” he added, “when he
should be sleeping. There must be many drawn by the light.”
So it ended in the couple building under the dining-room porch on
the shelf-like top of a column. Mrs. Phœbe chose this instead of a
window-ledge because from here she could look into the window
while brooding her eggs. “You may laugh at me all you choose,” said
she to her husband, “for I did wish the house empty. Since it cannot
be, however, I might as well see what the people in it do.”
“I was not laughing, my dear,” answered her husband meekly (you
remember that he had been married before). “I was only smiling
with pleasure at our fine nest. You have so much taste in arranging
grasses!”
That was the way in which the Phœbes began housekeeping. It was
not always easy, sitting on the nest day after day as Mrs. Phœbe had
to, with only a chance now and then to stretch her tired legs. She
was even glad that people lived in the house. “It gives me
something to think about,” said she, “although I do get much out of
patience with them sometimes. Much they know about bringing up
children! That Boy of theirs eats only three times a day. How can
they ever hope to raise him unless he eats more? Now, I expect to
feed my children all the time, and that is the way to do.” Here she
darted away to catch a Fly who came blundering along.
“It’s a good thing for that Fly that I got him,” she said, smilingly. “It
saved him from being caught in the Spider’s web over there, and I
am sure it is much pleasanter to be swallowed whole by a polite
Phœbe than to be nibbled at by a horrid Spider.”
Mr. Phœbe sometimes brought her a dainty morsel, but he spent
much of his time by the hydrant. “There is not much chance to
bathe,” he said, as he wallowed around in the little pool beside it,
“but it is something to smell water. You know we Phœbes like to fly
in and out of ponds and rivers, even when we cannot stop for a real
bath.” His favorite perch was on the top of a tall pole covered with
cinnamon vine, in the flower garden. Here he would sit for a whole
morning at a time, darting off now and then for an insect, but
always returning to the same place and position. He did not even
face the other way for a change.
The little Phœbes were hatched much like other birds, and were
about as good and about as naughty as children usually are. Mrs.
Phœbe was positive that they were remarkable in every way. Mr.
Phœbe, having raised other broods, did not think them quite so
wonderful, although he admitted that there was not another nestling
on the place to compare with them. “Still,” as he would modestly
remark, “we must remember that we are the only Phœbes here, and
that it is not fair to compare them with the young of other birds. You
could not expect our neighbors’ children to be as bright as they.”
Unfortunately there were only two little Phœbes, so each parent
could give all his time to one. The mother cared for the son and the
father for the daughter. When it was time for them to learn to catch
their own Flies, these children did not want to do so. The father
made his daughter learn, in spite of the fuss she made. He gave her
his old perch on the cinnamon-vine pole, and told her that she must
try to catch every insect that flew past. This was after she had been
out of the nest several days, and had learned to use her feet and
wings.
“If you do not,” he said, “I shall not feed you anything.” When she
pouted her bill, he paid no attention to it, and she soon stopped.
There is no use in pouting, you know, unless somebody is looking at
you and wishing that you wouldn’t. Perhaps it was because he had
brought up children before that Mr. Phœbe was so wise.
Mrs. Phœbe meant to be very firm also, but when her son
whimpered and said that he couldn’t, he knew he couldn’t, catch a
single one, and that he was sure he would tumble to the ground if
he tried it, she always felt sorry for him and said: “Perhaps you can
to-morrow.” Then she would catch food for him again.
This is how it happened that, day after day, a plump and strong
young Phœbe sat on a branch of the syringa bush and let his tired
mother feed him. At last his father quite lost patience and interfered.
“My dear,” he said to his wife, “I will be with our son to-day, and you
may have a rest.”
“You are very kind,” she replied, “but he is so used to having me that
I think I might better——”
“I said,” interrupted her husband, “that I would be with our son to-
day. I advise you to fly away with our daughter and show her
something of the world.” Mrs. Phœbe did not often hear him speak
in that tone of voice. When he did, she always agreed with him.
As soon as father and son were alone, the father said: “Now you are
going to catch Flies before sunset. You have let your poor mother
nearly work her feathers off for you. (Of course, feathers do not
come off so, but this was his way of speaking.) She is very tired, and
you are not to act like this again. There comes a Fly. Catch him!”
The young Phœbe made a wild dash, missed his Fly, and came back
to the syringa bush whimpering. “I knew I couldn’t,” he said. “I tried
as hard as I could, but he flew away.”
“Yes,” said his father. “You tried once, just once. You may have to try
a hundred times before you catch one, but that is no reason why
you should not try. Go for that Mosquito.”
The son went, and missed him, of course. This time he knew better
than to talk about it. He just flew back to his perch and looked
miserable.
“I think you got a little nearer to this one,” said his father. “Go for
that Fly!”
The young Phœbe was kept darting here and there so often that he
had no time to be sulky. Indeed, if people have to keep moving quite
fast, they soon forget to want to be sulky. At last he was surprised
by his father’s tucking a very delicious Bluebottle down his throat.
“Just for a lunch,” he explained. “Now try for that one.”
The son made a sudden lurch and flight, and actually caught him. It
was a much smaller Fly than the one which his father had fed him,
but it tasted better. He swallowed it as slowly as he could, so as to
feel it going down as long as possible. Then he began to be happier.
“Watch me catch that Mosquito,” he said. And when he missed him,
as he did, he made no fuss at all—only said: “I’ll get the next one!”
When he missed that he simply said: “Well, I’ll get the next one,
anyhow!”
And he did.
All day long he darted and failed or darted and succeeded, and more
and more often he caught the insect instead of missing him.
When the long shadows on the lawn showed that sunset was near,
his mother and sister came back. His mother had a delicious morsel
for him to eat. “Open your bill very wide,” she said, “you poor, tired,
hungry child.”
He did open his bill, because a Phœbe can always eat a little more
anyway, but he did not open it until he had said: “Why, I’m not much
tired, and I am not really hungry at all. You just ought to see me
catch Flies!”
You can imagine how surprised his mother was. And in the tall fir
tree near by he heard a Blackbird say something in a hoarse voice
about a persistent Phœbe. But that didn’t make much difference,
because, you see, he didn’t know what “persistent” meant, and if he
had known he could not have told whether the Blackbird was talking
about him or about his father. Could you have told, if you had been a
Phœbe?
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookname.com