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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 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?