Mindfulness

the bottled water of the therapy industry

Paul Moloney

pp. 269-292

in: Ronald E. Purser, David Forbes, Adam Burke (eds), Handbook of mindfulness, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

The rise of mindfulness in the Western world as both therapy and instrument of personal development in recent decades has little to do with its superior merits—which fade under critical analysis. This situation is close to that which obtains for the more established talking therapies, from which theorists and teachers of mindfulness seek to borrow much of their authority. Rather than 'science", the mindfulness movement owes its popularity (and its apparent successes) to the imperatives of fashion, to the promotional energies of the psychological therapies industry, and to its status as an officially endorsed palliative for overworked lives and troubled times. Detached from traditional Buddhist teachings and presented as a new technology of personal change, mindfulness is the latest phase in the privatization of the self that has been underway from the start of the twentieth century and in which the applied psychology professions have been instrumental. For governments, it represents a cheap alternative to the substantive social and economic policies needed to tackle widespread malaise.