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.