Therapeutic cultures in elite families in Brazil: Life coaching, sociality, and the moral economy of privilege

Abstract

Studies of wealth and the family have provided important insights into how financial and legal institutions allow the long-term perpetuation of fortunes, such as inheritance and trust laws, as well as examining the role of family offices and philanthropy as practices that upper-class families use to preserve their wealth across generations. Such scholarship has noticed that a flip side of this is that the family, as a unit involved in the preservation of inter-generational wealth, can also be a site of conflict that ultimately destroys great fortunes. Focusing on life coaching as a growing therapeutic cultural form among the wealthy in Brazil, I expand on these important financial and legal practices to include an often-ignored gendered site of elite reproduction: processes of self-cultivation to accrue interiority currency, as practiced by wealthy parents (especially mothers) in the socialization of family heirs. In this article, I analyze the intersection of wealth, gender, and therapeutic cultures, as they contour sociability and social reproduction in Ipanema, a well-known Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood. I draw from the experience of Vera Ferreira de Oliveira, a Brazilian woman from a working-class family in Niteroi who married into a very wealthy Ipanema family in the early 2000s. Through Vera’s life coaching experience with Katia Coutinho, I investigate the material repercussions (imagined or real) of therapeutic projects designed to alter the inner linings of the self and affective dispositions and to shape elite family sociability.