The problem of soft power
Or, what Sally Rooney illuminates about therapy culture
Hi! I’m The Overthinker and this week I’m exploring the problem of love and power in the novels of Sally Rooney.
For the last few years, I have maintained a Google Doc with extensive notes for a nascent thesis: That Sally Rooney, the Irish novelist and self-identified Marxist, really was writing romance novels with political and philosophical heft. Once upon a time, it was quite popular to say such a thing was impossible, or that at the very least Rooney specifically was not succeeding at this task. (Something about the fact that novels are bought and sold undermining the whole premise? I can’t recall.) But I was convinced that Rooney was doing exactly what she had set out to do — it was just easy to miss, because the "goods” exchanged in her novels were emotions themselves and, in particular, the feeling of power.
Is Nick, the older man, inherently more powerful in his age-gap relationship with Frances, a college student? Is Connell really powerless in his relationship with Marianne, because her wealthy family employed his working-class mother back in high school? In Conversations with Friends and Normal People, characters grapple quite explicitly with these questions. Yes, they are navigating elite universities, entrenched class dynamics, and other symbols of the “hard power” we know, fear, and fret over.1 But in those first two books, Rooney uses the words “power” and “powerful” at least 32 times, almost exclusively to describe the invisible exchange of energies between friends and lovers. This, I wrote in my notes, is the problem of soft power.
But I also felt this terrible power, like, you’re going to let me kiss you, what else will you let me do? It was sort of intoxicating. I couldn’t decide if I had complete power over you or no control at all. And what do you feel now? he said. More like complete control. Is that bad? He said he didn’t mind. He thought it was healthy for us to try and correct the power disparity, though he added that he didn’t think we would ever be able to do it completely. I told him that Melissa thought he was ‘pathologically submissive’ and he said it would be a mistake to assume that meant he was powerless in relationships with women. He told me he thought helplessness was often a way of exercising power. — Conversations with Friends
Ever since school he has understood his power over her. . . He has never been able to reconcile himself to the idea of losing this hold over her, like a key to an empty property, left available for future use. In fact he has cultivated it, he knows he has. — Normal People
Over the last few years, other writers have come to Rooney’s defense in the way I always wanted to. Most notably, in 2024, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu wrote favorably of Rooney’s “lover’s theory of Marxism.” But even as criticism catches up, my dusty old notes have not lost their value, because soft power remains notoriously difficult to see or discuss.
Saving the Modern Soul by the sociologist Eva Illouz is the latest book I’ve read to illuminate the nature of soft power. Illouz documents the spread of therapy culture — in therapy itself, in the workplace, in film and television — since Freud. In one particularly compelling chapter, she shows how psychologists successfully reframed work conflicts as stemming from “personality problems and a troubled childhood, not from the defective structural organization of capitalism.” These psychologists also offered a solution: better communication.
By the 1970s, essentially everyone had bought into this “ethic” of communication, which advanced the premise that good managers must understand why others experience base emotions like anger, jealousy, and hurt. Crucially, however, good managers must also refrain from displaying such emotions themselves. “Not reacting becomes the mark of self-control,” Illouz writes, “which in turn signals a hidden and subtle psychological power that can in fact bypass hierarchal status and power.” This, she continues, is in service of the psychoanalytic view of “the fully mature adult” as one who “prefers to react strategically and defend his interests rather than his honor.”
If the really self-confident person is one who is never humiliated, or, conversely, if the hurt or humiliated person is one who lacks self-confidence and therefore real power, this implies that the really powerful person must, almost by definition, not be hurt. Conversely, repeated experiences of hurt are likely to be translated into a psychological deficiency. To get angry, jealous, or explicitly hurt is, as psychological guides to leadership state over and over and again, to lack self-confidence, and therefore to lack real social power. — Saving the Modern Soul
Illouz persuasively argues that workplace psychologists effectively reconstituted emotional control “as a form of symbolic currency, defined by its ability to master, manage, and manipulate social bonds themselves.” Through such mastery, one could successfully advance their self-interest, the goal of any good capitalist. Over time, these expectations spilled out of management manuals and into the world at large. We now strive to be good, goal-oriented managers of our emotions in all contexts — professional, social, and romantic.2 And we often do it to maintain some semblance of “subtle psychological power.”
Sound familiar?
Rooney’s protagonists often begin their journeys determined to embody this unreasonable reason no matter what life throws at them. And if I’m representative of Rooney’s readers, well, we’re trying to do this too.
I thought about all the things I had never told Nick about myself, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body. I was a very autonomous and independent person with an inner life that nobody else had ever touched or perceived. — Conversations with Friends
She knows it would make him blush, and maybe she wants to force him to blush as a sadistic display of power, but that wouldn’t be like her, so she says nothing. — Normal People
Rooney’s most recent novel, Intermezzo, is also a book about love and sex and soft power. In this case, the love is between two brothers. The older one, Peter, is a lawyer in his 30s who embodies Illouz’s “ethos of communication” to his detriment. He is both reasonable and sympathetic — the perfect manager of self and others. He is also suicidally repressed. The much younger brother, Ivan, is an unemployed chess player. He struggles to adjust himself to the rules of the world, and worries he is fundamentally unfit for living.
For Peter, social systems are never confusing, always transparent, and usually manipulable to his own ends. He is someone who not only knows a vast number of people, but through knowing them can somehow make them do things he wants them to do. — Intermezzo
How often in his life he [Ivan] has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems, watching other people participate effortlessly in structures he can find no way to enter or even understand. — Intermezzo
Spoiler: Both brothers get their happy ending. But it was Ivan and Margaret’s age gap romance (he’s 22, she’s 36) that kept me reading. Unlike his well-mannered brother, Ivan expresses himself rather freely. He’s vulnerable and transparent; something of an emotional risk taker. His behavior is guided by Jesus, not Freud; he’s at least as defensive of his honor as of his interests. Margaret, a millennial self-manager par excellence, experiences a metamorphosis in the warm glow of Ivan’s love. Neither of them are vying for power in their relationship; no one seeks the upper hand. What, then, is the harm in base emotions, coarse reflexes, unpremeditated reactions, transparency, even vulnerability? Who, Margaret begins to wonder, is benefitting from all this restraint?
Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open. Everything exposed to the light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore. A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is. Lord have mercy. — Intermezzo
In Roots for Radicals, the community organizer Edward Chambers argues that many of the soft power problems we face come from confusion about the word “power” itself. “English speakers not only misunderstand power as a noun,” Chambers writes, “but also assume it exists in a fixed quantity” to be used unilaterally in the name of self-interest. Instead, Chambers explains, power is a verb; it’s created in relationships; and it is indivisible from its “conjugal partner”: love. “To power and love well is to respect the other and the self,” he writes. “In relational power, effects are given and received.”
Rooney’s ongoing exploration of soft power may not add up to a Marxist theory of romance. But it is, at the very least, a compelling analysis of romance under capitalism. The “subtle psychological power” of managerial empathy and self-restraint holds sway over Rooney’s young protagonists. But it’s this other definition — of power and love as non-monogamous conjugal partners, freely giving and receiving — that they all seem to be striving for.
Anything I missed? Send your advice column queries to asktheoverthinker@gmail.com and share your critiques, questions, and compliments in the comments section below.
Credits: Original art by Seattle-based illustrator Mara Parks Potter. Follow her on Instagram @maraparkspotter.
Notably, Sally Rooney’s fiction about hard power has, to date, been unbearable. Her third book, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, seemed to be a self-conscious rebuke of her critics. It tells a truly unmemorable story about a girl, who is rich and famous from writing books, dating a guy who works a dehumanizing job in an Amazon warehouse? Please never do this again, Sally!
This language shows up in Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapeutic modality based on the premise that all people have “manager parts” of their personality, which are formed in times of crisis, and work relentlessly to stave off disaster, keep upsetting emotions at bay, project confidence and control to others, etc.