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.