Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on a small group of Ugandan psychotherapists and their efforts and challenges to establish psychological psychotherapy as a practice and academic discipline in Uganda.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a small group of Ugandan psychotherapists and their efforts, since the early 2000s, to establish psychological psychotherapy as a practice and academic discipline in Uganda. Based on interviews with these 'pioneers of psy', I discuss the different challenges they have faced in translating, appropriating and adapting psy-services in a country where they have hitherto been largely unknown. Drawing on different examples, I show how in the day-to-day practice often unexpected events take place which force the therapists to rethink the models they have learned from western textbooks. Through these ongoing creative processes of 'doing psychotherapy' new insights, and a distinctively Ugandan form of psychotherapy, are emerging.