The government of happiness. Discourse analysis of Positive Psychology’s self-help

In the last decades there has been an increase of attention to happiness, and an rise of those areas that take it as an object of inquiry. An example of this is the proliferation of discourses about happiness in popular culture, specifically in self-help books linked to Positive Psychology. By using the foucauldian theoretical framework of governmentality is possible to analyze Psychology’s capacity to construct phenomena and promote particular subjectivities and forms of relationships akin to neoliberal rationality. In this work I pre-sent a discourse analysis of four self-help books. The texts’ discursive functions include a construction of happiness as an objectively and scientifically knowable object. They also define a desirable subjectivity model, with characteristics such as individualism and moderation. The promoted happy subject is a Homo Economicus, an entrepreneur of the self who’s able to self-govern.