Paper short abstract:

This paper inquires into the idea of the Other as the subject of transcultural psychiatric intervention aimed at torturesurvivors living in Denmark. I elucidate the ambiguities underpinning therapeutic interventions, engaging with critical concepts such as empathy, suffering and other minds.

Paper long abstract:

This paper inquires into the idea of the Other when the Other is the subject of transcultural psychiatric intervention. Based on recent fieldwork in the field of transcultural psychiatry aimed at survivors of torture now living in Denmark my concern is to tease out ideas of the Other as someone in need of a particular, that is transcultural, rather than ordinary psychiatric intervention. What are the markers of the assumptions that therapists hold to be true, and different about the Other that is not like us. I thereby hope to get nearer to the assumptions about who the therapeutic Other can be said to be and what place such an Other takes up in the imagination of Danish therapists working in this field. The context for such an inquiry is a political climate in which the Danish state on the one hand thinks of itself as the empathic state per se and on the other hand tries actively to minimize the amount of refugees from primarily the Arab peninsular. Simultaneously Danish doctors, psychiatrists and psychologists have for many years spearheaded treatment and thinking about interventions to survivors of torture both in their current places of dwelling as well as in their countries of origin. I thereby hope to contribute to the field of Global Mental Health with a discussion of some of the political ambiguities underpinning therapeutic interventions to new citizens in Scandinavia whilst engaging with critical concepts such as empathy, otherness, suffering and other minds.