raising material expectations, influential international policy-makers such as Eric
Schumacher called for their moderation and the fulfilment of basic needs to ward off
potential frustration and aggression (1973: 29). Mass industrialization and urbanization
were pathologized as creating the rootless, alienated individuals (Berger, 1974). Instead
fostering less intensive sustainable development and stable communities were proposed
(UNESCO, 1993). Given the antipathy to promoting material expectations and how the
needs-based approach derives from psychological theories on frustration (Maslow, 1970),
it is not perhaps surprising that psychological needs should come to the fore. Western
policy increasingly conceives needs in psychological rather than material terms: social
justice is being re-interpreted as ensuring „parity of esteem‟, and „self esteem and self
respect‟ are treated as „distributable goods‟ (Samuels, 2001: 57). Therapeutic well-being
is also displacing universal prosperity as the goal of international development policy
(Pender, 2002). Development is no longer about industrialization and is arguably „more
concerned with getting inside the head to stay the hand‟ than building things or
redistributing resources (Duffield, 2001: 312). So populations are expected to take more
responsibility for their own material needs, even while they are not trusted to manage
their own emotions without external guidance. Grievances are to be treated as stressors
impairing a sense of well-being, amenable to emotional adjustment through self-esteem,
empowerment, or other emotional management programmes. What the international
therapeutic approach advances for populations is „a manipulatable sense of well-being‟
(Rieff, 1966: 45), rather than a material transformation of their conditions. Thus the
population of Bosnia is diagnosed as having a „subjective poverty problem‟, not a real
one, by Zlatko Hurtic, formerly of the World Bank and now in charge of Bosnia‟s
poverty reduction strategy unity (Eager, 2003). Diagnosing the problem as „emotional‟,
he suggests the population need to lower their material expectations and cannot presume
to live as they did before the war.
A key theme of contemporary emotionology is the promotion of self-esteem to counter
feelings of alienation and demoralization. Promoting self-esteem should not be equated
with promoting independence, self-confidence and ambition: over-ambition and
emotional self-reliance are feared under the new emotionology as much as the disruptive
emotion of anger. Overcoming low self-esteem is about restraining the emotions:
tempering frustration, not firing ambition. Policy-makers want to moderate aspirations
and thereby discourage grievances from germinating. Thus the new people-centred
initiatives entail systematically lowering participants‟ expectations - couched in ethical
terms of not unrealistically raising the participants‟ hopes (Pender, 2002). Indeed a
prominent advocate of therapeutizing politics highlights how, „[o]ne poignant
contribution that a psychotherapy viewpoint might make to political life is to help people
face up to the inevitability of disappointment‟ (Samuels, 1996: 3). Accordingly much
effort is expended by international facilitators in contemporary participatory development
schemes trying to „avoid raising unrealistic and high expectations [within] the
community‟ (UNDP Vietnam, 1999, cited in Wahlberg, 2003). However, the disciplining
aspects of psychosocial adjustment programmes are mystified by the disavowed
therapeutic language of self-actualization, participation, empowerment and self-esteem.
The disciplining aspects of the international war trauma model are evident in its
association of untreated trauma with dysfunctionality, discussed in the next section.