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.