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- Convenors:
-
Mayssa Rekhis
(University of Gothenburg - EHESS)
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer)
Keir Martin (University of Oslo)
Arsenii Khitrov (University of Oslo)
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- Discussant:
-
Keir Martin
(University of Oslo)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 24 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how psychotherapy can be envisioned as a social technology that undoes aspects of the social and re-makes them in different ways and at different scales, from the internalised social relations that make up the individual person to the nation as imagined community.
Long Abstract:
The development of psychotherapy as a technology of the self has been widely explored, problematised and theorised in anthropology and the social sciences. In particular it has often been critiqued for a universal understanding of human nature contained within the discrete bounded individual. While this picture may accurately characterise much of twentieth-century psychotherapy, contemporary psychotherapies seem to be more grounded in (and intricate with) different social doing practices and dynamics. Through its roles in the emergence of new social categories, in war rehabilitation and the creation of post-war social imaginaries, in migrant integration and the homogenisation of “host” societies, in feeding collective imaginaries and ideals, and in transformative processes, psychotherapy seems not only to be at the heart of a tension of the social and the personal, but to be actively engaged in resolving it or redrawing its boundaries. By problematising the distinction between inside and outside, between the social and the personal, psychotherapy often remakes the very foundational assumptions of what it is to be social. From redoing the nation as an imagined community to reorganising the internalised social relations that make up the individual person, psychotherapy seems to be reshaping the social.
This panel invites papers that aim to look at how psychotherapy can be envisioned as a social technology that undoes aspects of the social and re-makes them in different ways and at different scales. We invite papers looking at psychotherapeutic engagement with (un)doing and re-doing the social, from a variety of places, perspectives, scales and dimensions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 24 July, 2024, -Tamara Kusimova (Independent Scholar)
Paper short abstract:
By 2022, a massive industry of online "Marathons of Wishes" had emerged in Russia. What kind of socio-political conditions have created such a huge demand for the ability to wish, to dream, and for the affect associated with it? What type of agency and ethical regime do those marathons promote?
Paper long abstract:
By 2022, a massive industry of online "Marathons of Wishes" had emerged in Russia. The most popular of these marathons is associated with Elena Blinovskaya, a former housewife who, according to legend, became a billionaire by teaching people how to dream properly. Such phenomena are usually discussed as deception of gullible people, but I suggest taking a serious look at the content of such marathons.
The marathon consists of basic psychotherapeutic techniques - you are given homework with questions like "Who am I?", "What do I want from my life?" and so on. The techniques are mixed with esoteric elements about "The Universe" favouring you, which should increase the affective component of the course. The marathons are aimed at a predominantly female audience - women who have to cope daily with the burden of responsibility for family, children and their own lives while living in huge inequalities and institutional conditions that are as unfriendly as possible to income growth and vertical mobility.
Based on the autoethnographic experience of participating in such a marathon, observations of other participants and analysis of Blinovskaya's social media presence, I will discuss what kind of agency and ethical regime these marathons promote. What socio-political conditions have created a massive demand for the ability to wish, to dream, and for the associated effect? Is the attempt to psychologize everyday difficulties a way of diverting attention from existing structural problems in Russian society, or is there still room for proactive agency within this phenomenon?
Arsenii Khitrov (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
Recent studies show a surge in private psychotherapy in countries like Russia, viewing it as a self-shaping tool. My research at a Russian therapy centre (2021-22) examines how therapists envision social change. I analyse how, amidst the war in Ukraine, therapists seek a new 'therapised' society.
Paper long abstract:
Recent studies indicate a growing popularity of private psychotherapy in various countries, including Russia. Psychotherapy is often seen as a technology of the self, shaping individuals' values, discourse, and behaviour. It is commonly perceived as individualistic, focusing solely on personal experiences and grounded in the mistrust towards social institutions. In this talk, I explore an overlooked aspect of psychotherapy: how psychotherapists envision the social world and possible collective transformation. I approach psychotherapy as a cultural, i.e., meaning-making industry. My ethnographic and interview-based research, conducted at a therapeutic training centre in Russia from 2021 to 2022, reveals a prevalent ideal of a socially transformative ‘therapised’ subject and violence-free sociality. These ideals imply breaking the cycle of violence imposed by the state and family across generations and passing on new attitudes resulting from therapy to future generations as a sort of heritage, ultimately making Russia a ‘normal’, i.e., ‘European’ country. I investigate ethnographically the implications and tensions of pursuing these ideals amidst the major disruptions caused by the pandemic and Russia's war against Ukraine.
Livia Garofalo (Data Society Research Institute)
Paper short abstract:
Psychotherapy has evolved from an in-office encounter to one mediated by technology and private digital platforms. This presentation asks how mental health professionals "doing the work" in the US are becoming digital subjects and adapting to new reconfigurations of therapeutic labor.
Paper long abstract:
Psychotherapy has traditionally been an in-person encounter between provider and patient engaged in a dedicated time for paid attention for the purposes of therapeutic intimacy (Zeavin 2021). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the expedited the growth of teletherapy and the increase in demand for mental healthcare in the United States has resulted in the massive growth of therapy platforms. These platforms promise to virtually connect patients to therapists, unburden providers from administrative work, use AI for some provider labor, and provide therapists with a consistent client base. From the entrance of asynchronous “text therapy” compensated per word to promises of seamless “matches” between client and therapist and the reality of the gigification of therapy work, therapists’ own subjectivity in this new clinical environment and labor market has shifted. Based on interviews and group sessions with therapists in the United States who work in telehealth and for therapy platforms, in this presentation I explore how digital care has significantly changed how practitioners “do the work” of psychotherapy, understand their own professional expertise, and earn a living. What does it mean to engage in “therapeutic seeing” through the mediation of technology? How is the “scaling-up” of mental health apps/services remaking social understandings of what is “therapy” and “therapeutic”? Reflecting on the dimensions of time/space, mind/body, attention/money that operate the psychotherapeutic space, I argue that the increasing shift to platforms and telepsychology re-signifies the meaning of therapy as a “technology of the self” and restructures mental healthcare as a psycho-social-technical apparatus.
Zahra Abbasi
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that, in certain contexts in contemporary Iran, psychotherapy becomes a transformative locus that extends beyond individual healing, incorporating social critique as a fundamental element of psychotherapeutic practice.
Paper long abstract:
This paper argues that, in certain contexts in contemporary Iran, psychotherapy becomes a transformative locus that extends beyond individual healing, incorporating social critique as a fundamental element of psychotherapeutic practice. Building upon interviews with Iranian mental health practitioners active online and in person, this paper posits that psychotherapy and one-on-one interaction of individuals and the psychotherapist has also become a fundamental space for social criticism in Iran. For instance, some practitioners refer to the milieu and context that creates illness, anxiety, and distress, and criticize the individualistic approaches they practice and foster in their praxis. A practitioner and mental health activist observes, for example: “our patient enters our office from an unhealthy society . Leaving our office an hour or forty-five minutes later, she immediately re-enters an unhealthy society.” While underscoring the disconnect between therapeutic performance and the societal context to which patients return, he problematizes the broader effectiveness of psychotherapy within societal instability and institutional hurdles. Another interlocutor discusses the role of cultural, educational, familial, and societal influences in shaping idealistic aspirations of success and a lack of critical thinking. She emphasizes that psychotherapeutic methods facilitate filling the void left by these institutions. This paper explicates the reconceptualization of psychotherapy in which it is located as a critical tool for traversing and restructuring the intricate interplay between the personal and the social in the quest for wellbeing in an ill-disposed context.
Martin Eggen Mogseth (University of Bergen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how Californian donor conceived persons employ therapeutic discourse in the restructuring of identity and biographical life, which is inextricable from the context of nongenetic and unknown genetic parentage. Thus, therapy remolds relationality way beyond the therapy room.
Paper long abstract:
As a social technology, psychotherapy is increasingly incorporated in the realm of assisted reproduction in California. This is especially true in the case of younger, left leaning, educated people, both among (those seeking to become) donors, parents, and among donor conceived persons themselves. In the last decade some clinics and sperm banks have even begun to recommend consultation for both prospective parents and donors, concerning among other things the lack of a genetic link in parentage and vice versa. The tendency is indicative of a broader permeation of psychological jargon in the negotiation of relationality and personal experience in California. In this paper I wish to explore how donor conceived persons, after learning they are donor conceived, perform inwardness through psychotherapeutic discourse and in its name restructure identity and biographical life. This restructuring is inextricable from the social situation of nongenetic parentage, from the bioinformatic body, and not least from the question of the unknown progenitor. Therapy, thus, is not confined to the therapy room, but seeps into and remolds the very foundations of what it is to be relational, hence what it is to be human.
Francesca Morra (University of Turin)
Paper short abstract:
The contemporary imaginaries of a happily productive subject are unbearable, and sometimes seem unescapable. How can psychotherapy transform, and be transformed by, those forms of suffering that cross social, historical and political fields?
Paper long abstract:
J. often thinks of how to take his own life. He came to Italy two years ago, from a city in North-East China. He used to work as an engineer in a petrochemical plant, for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. “I hate the company,” he says. His dream was to learn the languages and move to Europe: “I wanted to escape,” from a fractured family, his fellows’ hostility, an oppressive job. J. has imagined Italy as the horizon of his escape, a place for a good life. Yet, once there, he repeatedly faces experiences of rejection – at the university, with partners, with friends – and does not know whether he wants to live, or die.
Drawing on an ethnography of psychotherapy sessions, this contribution aims at exploring the forms and grounds of suffering of Chinese young adults in Italy, thus asking: How is psychotherapy transformed vis-à-vis the tension between symptoms, precarity and imaginaries of mobility? Thoughts of death, self-harm, social withdrawal recur in many biographies, crossing social, historical and political fields. The different imaginaries produced by sino-capitalism and neoliberalism resonate with each other, sometimes coming into conflict, and occupying the psychic life. The ideal of a subject who is at once productive, and self-realised, healthy, happy, generates symptoms – frustrated aspirations, sense of failure, shrunken desires. In these circumstances, is it still possible to reclaim a chance of (collective) desire? Can psychotherapy be an act of “radical imagination” (Castoriadis), and thus unsettle harmful social dynamics?
Anne Sigfrid Grønseth (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer)
Paper short abstract:
Exploring how psychotherapeutic approaches play into child welfare work with migrant families in Norway, I argue a tension between the culturally specific, but universal social qualities as opposed to disembedding approaches in child welfare, redoing experiences of the social personhood and self.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how psychotherapeutic approaches play into child welfare casework with migrant minority families in Norway. Based on in-depth interviews with parents and child welfare workers, and inspired by phenomenological analysis, the paper examines the narrations as they speak of distinctions between the socially particular and universal, and the undoing and redoing of the social in child welfare practices. Justifying the decisions in child welfare work, the child is no longer foremost expected to be valued as an investment for future social benefit, but more for their own agentive being in the here and now, and recognized with human rights. In accordance, parents are less expected to exercise parental authority but to take responsibility in securing what is held to be in the ‘best interest of the child’. Here, the attention is turned towards how parents interpret and act in relation to the child’s signals and thus redo the social into relations that support attachment and emotional regulation. Holding on to such psychotherapeutic ideas and images of a universal ‘normal family’ and ‘healthy child’, I suggest, contribute to many migrant minority families’ perceptions of the child welfare to “discriminate”, “steal our children” and stimulate emigration to prevent the children from becoming “too Norwegian” or to “strengthen own religious or cultural identity”. Such reactions, I propose, reflect experiences of unbelonging and tensions between the culturally specific, but universally human qualities of sociality, as opposed to the disembedding approaches in child welfare, redoing experiences of the social personhood and self.
Mayssa Rekhis (University of Gothenburg - EHESS)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how social integration infused psychotherapeutic practices targeting traumatized refugees. It scrutinizes how integration got transformed from a migration-related policy to becoming the El Dorado of psychotherapy: an equivalent of recovery and healing.
Paper long abstract:
While trauma used to be mobilized to legitimize the victim status and to identify “real refugees” (Fassin & Rechtman, 2007), we are now witnessing a new trauma regime focused on survival. In the case of refugees, this survival paradigm gets intertwined with integration and creates new hierarchies and categorizations: the good and the bad refugees, the good being the ones able to survive, overcome their trauma, and integrate into their new communities.
Despite the critique of this integration apparatus in social sciences scholarship, migrant activist circles, and most of the time, therapeutic spaces engaged with exiles, with this categorization, these spaces couldn't escape taking on a new role. Therapy became, also, a space of strengthening the capacities of survival and integration of the “not-yet integrated” refugees, a process that reshaped the therapist-patient relationship, the therapists’ role, the expectations from therapy and the therapeutic practices themselves.
Integration is transformed not only into a moral imperative by the host society but also into an individual psychological competency that psychotherapy works on developing and accompanying. Through an ethnography of a therapeutic space for refugees in Sweden, this paper scrutinises how integration infused the clinical world, became the new equivalent for trauma recovery and the El Dorado of psychotherapy targeting exiles.
Chiara Feliciani (Graduate Institute of Geneva) Sandra Cavaliere (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
Paper short abstract:
This paper combines our individual experiences on the field as an anthropologist in a criminalised and stigmatised neighbourhood of Naples, and as a psycho-therapist in two main prison of the city. We look at the instrument of ‘the group’ for a nuanced analysis of the intimate and social sphere.
Paper long abstract:
What are the prospects of integrating psychotherapy and anthropology in the analysis of collective trauma in marginalized and stigmatized urban contexts? Through our experiences in the city of Naples, we focus on pathways intersecting with the phenomena of incarceration and organized crime. We compare two field experiences: the analysis of therapy groups conducted with inmates and their families in two penitentiaries by a psychotherapist, and the dialogue circles conducted by an anthropologist with women in a neighborhood marked by the presence of crime presence.
In her Healing Trauma, psychoanalysis (1997), Judith Lewis Herman writes that '[t]he reconstruction of social bonds begins with the discovery that one is not alone' and that 'nowhere is this experience more immediately powerful or compelling than in a group'. Putting in conversation our two experiences with this tool, it became evident to us that an interdisciplinary approach to reality allows understanding categories to dismantle them and bring out the singularities of our fields' contexts.
Integrating the clinical approach of psychotherapy with the anthropological understanding of culture, practices, and social structures provides a more comprehensive view of collective and transgenerational trauma. Interdisciplinary analysis is useful for delving into the cultural meanings of trauma by understanding personal and collective experiences related to trauma and the possibilities of resilience. Successfully listening to the real point of view of those living in the territory allows us to develop a more adequate potential directions of intervention that can be implemented in contexts of criminalisation; as activists, academics and practitioners.
Jessica Cooper (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic field research undertaken in court-mandated group therapy sessions in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper explores how the provision of state-enforced psychotherapy unknots and remakes ethical horizons for the clinicians tasked with providing this kind of care.
Paper long abstract:
In San Francisco, clinicians in publicly funded mental health clinics often refuse to engage with clients’ narratives of violence, racism, and misogyny. I consider the ethical challenge and valence of such refusals in the context of group therapy sessions for clients sent to the clinic by criminal courts for treatment. These sessions are designed to teach court-referred clients to control their feelings and conduct so as to be better liberal subjects. Clinicians’ refusals to engage with clients on certain terms express an ethics that run counter to liberal expectations and counter to the institutional demand of liberal subjectivation. Attending ethnographically to the impasses of ethical negotiation in the clinic show the incompleteness of liberal ethics and affords an analytic vantage from which to consider ethics in an illiberal key. By engaging a concept of aporia, I consider how ethics are undone and recast in the course of a psychotherapeutic encounter.