Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research on psychotherapy that centered anthropology and deemphasized psychology, I demonstrate how medical anthropology provided therapists with a therapeutic voice to support their patients. Anthropology was also used to police the authenticity of their therapeutic voice.

Paper Abstract:

What are the effects of deemphasizing psychological and psychiatric expertise in favor of anthropological expertise in psychotherapy? I examine a kind of psychotherapy developed in France to support people who are immigrants, refugees, and non-francophone. In this form of psychotherapy, therapists are encouraged to draw less on the modes of interpretation and questioning of the psy- professions, and instead turn to their own lived experience and understandings of anthropology to become more attuned to their patients’ experiences of distress. I draw on nearly two years of ethnographic research in France in four clinics that practice this kind of psychotherapy, as well as interviews with 65 therapists and their students. My analysis of the ways that therapists used anthropology reveals how these therapists navigated between improvisation and authority in the ways they spoke with patients and each other. I argue that engaging medical anthropology helped therapists witness the experiences of their patients and provided a therapeutic voice. Anthropology could also be used to police the speech of therapists when their therapeutic voice was considered irrelevant or inauthentic. I conclude by examining how anthropological and psychological/psychiatric expertise haunt one another in this form of therapy and in anthropologically oriented clinical practice and training more generally. I expand on this ethnographic case to develop the notion of the haunted curriculum in health professions education, which examines how sites of clinical training and expertise can counter and/or reproduce forms of injustice.