Table of Contents

Critical happiness studies: an invitation

NICHOLAS HILL, SVEND BRINKMANN AND ANDERS PETERSEN

PART I Fantastical happiness: an impossible ideal

1 Happiness, a moralistic fantasy

CARL CEDERSTRÖM

2 ‘Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof’: understanding the pursuit of happiness as ideology

ANDERS PETERSEN

3 ‘The sickness unto health’: self-reification, self-love, and the critique of happiness in contemporary life

ALASTAIR MORGAN

PART II The political and social effects of happiness

4 Hijacking the language of functionality? In praise of ‘negative’ emotions against happiness

EDGAR CABANAS AND EVA ILLOUZ

5 Happiness and the new politicization of subjectivity

GRANT DUNCAN

6 Happiness: a societal ‘imperative’?

LAURA HYMAN

7 ‘It’s the soul that needs the surgery’? The social life of (un)happiness

NICHOLAS HILL

PART III Resources for critical happiness studies

8 Living well and living right: aesthetic and ethical dimensions of happiness

SVEND BRINKMANN

9 Sociology, biographical research, and the development of critical happiness studies

MARK CIESLIK

10 Drowning in liquidity: Zygmunt Bauman on happiness, ambivalence, and security

JORDAN MCKENZIE

11 Complicating the happy cure: psychoanalysis and the ends of analysis

COLIN WRIGHT

About the Author

Nicholas Hill is an early career researcher located at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. His PhD thesis examined the intersection of happiness and suffering in contemporary life. His wider research focuses on emotions and contemporary life, therapeutic and self-help culture, and experiences of health and illness, particularly mental health.

Svend Brinkmann is professor of psychology and qualitative methods and codirector of the Center for Qualitative Studies at Aalborg University, Denmark. He is the author of Qualitative Inquiry in Everyday Life, Qualitative Interviewing and Psychology as a Moral Science, and Diagnostic Cultures and the coauthor of InterViews (Third Edition): Learning the Craft of Qualitative Research Interviewing.

Anders Petersen is associate professor of sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark and coeditor of Imaginative Methodologies: Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research, The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization and Late Modern Subjectivity and Its Discontents: Anxiety, Depression and Alzheimer’s Disease.