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Paper short abstract:

Based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork at a Russian private therapy training centre where I am also a student, I explore the intersection of the professional dispositions of my therapeutic community and its dispositions towards Russia’s recent past.

Paper long abstract:

Based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork at a Russian private therapy training centre where I am also a student, I explore the intersection of the professional dispositions of my therapeutic community and its dispositions towards Russia’s recent past. I focus on a few vignettes illustrating how past social experiences of the trainers and trainees interweave with their interpretations of the psychological theories they work with. In particular, I show how trainers use Murray Bowen’s theory to explain the fall of the Soviet Union and conflicts on the post-Soviet space; and how they simultaneously explain this very theory through references to concrete social and political transformations. I show how the trainees learn to appreciate Bowen’s insights and to use his theory to construct class and political aspects of their subjectivities. I surmise that the trainees often find themselves at the nexus of two learning processes: first, the appreciation of the prescriptive idea that therapists should be value-neutral and, second, the descriptive, tacit, and taken for granted class- and politics-related ideas expressed in therapeutic discourse. In this paper, I approach these dispositions as processes and relations, and show how their analysis might help us better understand both the therapeutic field in Russia today and the social identities of people who are currently becoming therapists and practice as such.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the anxieties and affective responses of American graduate students to the lexical implementation of “culture concepts” into psychotherapeutic curricula and training programs, as well as its effect on therapeutic considerations of what is "bedrock" in clinical work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the anxieties and affective responses of graduate students to the lexical implementation of “culture concepts” into psychotherapeutic curricula in the contemporary United States. Considering anthropological critiques of the questionable “competency” rubrics of cultural knowledge acquisition in mental health fields, this paper provides an ethnographic elucidation of actual students’ uptake of these rubrics in a graduate program in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Confrontation with these rubrics, it turns out, is not an entirely academic affair. Via interviews with students and the researcher’s first-hand experiences as a trainee, this paper argues that the idea of “culture,” as it is taught and mobilized in curricula that attempt to widen the scope of client accessibility and respond to socio-political unrest, re-activates a repertoire of unformulated emotional experiences and deep traumata more apropos of parallel yet distinct categories of race, gender, ability, and sexuality—indeed, almost all axes of socio-political difference except the cultural coordinates of socio-economic “class.” A re-reading of the curricula, in turn, suggests that the contemporary uptake of American-Boasian framings of culture concepts in psychotherapy—rooted in Erik Erickson / Ruth Benedict and Harry Stack Sullivan / Edward Sapir—re-signifies cultural difference as an index of ontologized identity relations of power and privilege. An entailment of this resignification is that psychodynamic psychotherapists trained in extant programs focused on “multicultural competency” in the United States are more likely to frame clients’ struggles in terms of socio-political trauma that is more “real” than any unconscious dynamics that might be brought to consciousness during treatment.

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Paper short abstract:

While middle-class Indonesians use hypnotherapy to support such goals as optimising workplace efficiency or maximising educational attainment, the self-theories underpinning their practice lead to the emergence of subjects who differ markedly from conventional portraits of neoliberalism.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 2000s, Indonesia has witnessed a surge of middle-class interest in ‘Western-style’ hypnotherapy. Hypnotherapy has not only been embraced as a clinical practice but is also widely used in non-clinical spaces such as schools, offices, and family homes. This paper explores the reasons behind these developments, asking why practices such as ‘hypnoteaching’ and ‘hypnoparenting’, which are typically viewed with alarm in Euro-American settings, should be so readily embraced in the Indonesian context, and elucidating the individual and collective identities that emerge as a result of their institutionalisation.

From the perspective of the self-theories circulating amongst Indonesian hypnotherapists, there is nothing inappropriate about hypnotherapy’s incursion into the intimate relations of schooling or family life – a reaction that makes most sense in contexts where the decentring of self-control elicits a sense of ‘agency panic’. Instead, hypnoteaching and hypnoparenting are seen as more deliberate and controlled versions of the relationalities and influences that shape subjectivity on an everyday basis. Hypnotherapy discourse highlights how selves are vulnerable to the words of others, and dependent upon others for care and therapeutic support. Equally, it underscores the consequentiality of everyday speech, aiming to produce subjects who are mindful of the ways they contribute to symbolic environments through which others must move. Thus even as hypnotherapists see themselves as vanguards of collective action to secure prosperous national futures in a time of globalised neoliberalism, hypnotherapy generates subjects whose attention to their responsibility for each other differs markedly from conventional anthropological portraits of ‘neoliberal subjectivity’.

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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the narratives of psychological counsellors in urban Sri Lanka, this paper examines how therapeutic discourses become entwined with middle class moralities and aspirations centered on family life and how this process reshapes family ideologies as well as the meaning of self-work.

Paper long abstract:

While the global expansion of psychotherapy has been linked to the growing ideological importance of liberal versions of individualism among the world’s diverse urban elites and middle classes, what does it mean for the forms of relatedness that structure and sustain our everyday lives—for the ways people continue to fall in love, raise children, and strive to nurture family ties? How might we understand the subjective effects of psy discourses when we center these everyday forms of relationality as well as the political and gender ideologies that inform them? Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s Central Province between 2018 and 2020, in this paper I discuss how urban, university-educated counsellors working in the government sector describe the transformative role of psy in their lives. Through their narratives, I examine how psychological discourses become entwined with middle class moralities and aspirations centered on family life and economic wellbeing and how this process reshapes the meaning of self-work, pointing to psychological counselling as, among other things, a discourse on relatedness. I argue that while the counsellors’ practiced enactment of therapeutic knowledge appears to reproduce gendered visions of moral personhood that echo dominant family ideologies, it also reflects these practitioners’ critical perspectives and ongoing negotiation of these values in relation to their own and their clients’ lives.