Finnish welfare state model is often characterized as ideal in terms of its universal basic services and social security benefits. In recent decades, however, universalistic welfare state model has been taken greater steps towards neoliberal idealization that emphasize efficiency and competitiveness, similarly altering the relationship between the state and citizenship. Hence, when destabilizing the traditional welfare structure, it has been particularly important to support individuals to take a greater responsibility of their life and behavior (Heiskala & Kantola 2010; Kananen 2012). Brunila and Ylöstalo (2020) have previously pointed that neoliberalization of Finnish welfare state is strongly linked to the rise of the therapeutic welfare policies, characterized as increasing intentions to activate, train and support individuals for he needs of labor market. Therapeutic culture refers here to a wider social change, where psychologizing discourses have spread into schools and families, institutions, and everyday life of individuals with profound effects on identity, personal and cultural discourses (Nehring et al 2015).

This presentation builds on an article in which I look at education for young people as a manifestation of therapeutic culture. By youth education I mean different kind of short-term trainings and mentoring programs that are targeted to young people deemed to be in challenging life situations. Common objective in these trainings is to remove psychological barriers that would otherwise prevent for participating in traditional education or working life (Mäkelä 2018; Mertanen et al 2020). In this sense, it is perhaps not surprising that therapeutic ideas and practices have become common and rather unquestioned in youth education aims as improving self-esteem, individual strength and capacity, happiness, and positivity via the psy-oriented vocabulary of mental health, emotions, and anxieties (Brunila 2020). Especially techniques adopted from broader therapy cultures, such as cognitive-behavioural therapies, are increasingly applied to education of young people as forms of coaching and mentoring.

In this paper, I focus on youth education in Finland as an emblematic manifestation of therapeutic culture by discursively analyzing training materials of two cases-studies. The first case is a worldwide resilience building programme targeting young people at risk of social exclusion, implemented in Finland and internationally. The second one is a psychological flexibility coaching in Finland in the context of national-wide youth guidance centers aiming towards increasing young people’s employability. Trainings were selected as they both draw back from the basic principles of third wave cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) framework focusing on challenging and changing cognitive distortions (such as thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes) and their associated behaviors to improve emotional regulation and develop personal coping strategies (Hayes and Hofmann, 2021; Kahl, Winter, Schweiger 2012). In both trainings, the techniques adopted from CBT promise the subject a better understanding of the self and possibility to become liberated from cognitive distortions and believes delimiting the possibilities to live life in its’ fullest. I wanted to examine these objectives further and detect how do these trainings delimit the rules of self formation. Inspired by Michael Foucault’s (1986) theoretical work on ‘technologies of the self’, I ask  how do these trainings set rules for the subject’s self-transformation?

Foucault defines “technologies of the self” as techniques “which permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality” (Foucault 1988, 18).Technologies of the self as collection of self-directing technologies seeks for understand the relationship that the self establishes with itself in relation to the precepts of ‘good’ life, and the techniques that the self uses to test and monitor itself to follow the moral goal. Foucault’s technologies include four interrelated practices where the individual is expected i) to delimit the part of their self that will form the object of their moral practice, ii) define their positions relative to the precept they will follow and iii) decides on a certain mode of being that serve as the precept of a moral goal. The ethical work takes place in iv) practices where individuals are directed to act upon, to undertake, to monitor, to test and improve themselves in accordance with the precepts of the ‘good’ and ‘desired life (Lefebvre 2018; Foucault 1988) I have adopted discursive approach as our analytical strategy based on Michael Foucault’s (2000) theoretical work. I understand discourses as historically contingent social systems, statements and speeches that organize reality, also the psychic life of the subject. I see that discourses ‘guide’ the subject’s self-formation by providing linguistic tools to make sense of the self and govern oneself according to certain discursive expectations (Foucault, 2000). When doing analysis, I decided to let the four states of technologies to lead the analysis. I started by defining the moral goal by looking at the explicit and implicit values that these trainings were about to give to the subject. Here after, I moved towards the ‘ethical substance’, and asked the data in which ways the psyche was seen problematic or what was the main error that these trainings were about to change. Defining the ethical substance helped us to understand in which ways the subject was expected to define their relation to the moral goal as a way of submission. The final step, as dictating the term for ethical work, involved examining the processes individuals were expected to test, monitor, reflect, guide themselves in relation to moral goals.

I have demonstrated in this paper how these trainings produce a certain kind of a subjectivity. Young people are instructed to make sense of their self by delimiting those part of the self (harmful thoughts and feelings) that are seen as potentially ‘vulnerabilising’ and create a conscious and accepting relationship with harmful thoughts and feelings. To minimize their controlling hold, young people are expected to develop wide range of strategies, to cut loose of the controlling hold of the ‘negative’. These strategies include for example technologies of self-soothing, mindfulness and emotional regulation. Hence, the moral goal is the aim for self-mastery. This self-directed work and control, in turn, is necessary for a person to become free and rational individual (e.g Foucault 1986). It is important to acknowledge that technologies of the self in youth education demonstrate bigger changes in welfare agendas and structures, where discarding the traditional welfare structures individual are replaced with effort to in supporting individual responsibility and self-mastery, especially what it comes to life areas such as education, work, and well-being. Here, psy-discourses in provides a grid of intelligibility for governing young people with certain identifiable and controllable propensities such as their self-steering and self-mastering capacities (also Rose, 1998). In this sense, our results confirm some extent previously discovered phenomenon of the “therapization of education” (Ecclestone & Hayes 2008), where maintaining optimal metal well-being is increasingly taken as a form of education, an assemblage of skills that can be learned and maintained.

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