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.