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- Convenors:
-
Samuele Collu
(McGill)
Aidan Seale-Feldman (University of Virginia)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Sessions:
- Friday 9 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
What might an anthropology of "psychic life" add to foundational studies of self, mind and emotion, mental illness, embodiment, experience, or subjectivity?
Long Abstract:
Each year we face ever-increasing disasters-fires, hurricanes, rising temperatures, global pandemics—all of which are entangled with rising authoritarianism, ongoing racism, white supremacy, and intersectional violence in the United States and worldwide. While we are still witnessing the propagation of disciplinary and biopolitical societies-from prisons and psychiatric institutions to algorithmic governance-we are also seeing the emergence of new psychopolitical forms of exploitation that drain out and exhaust our vital energy, our desires, and our affects (Clough 2018). How might we consider psychic life not only a site of biopolitical management (Rose 1998) economic extraction (Berardi 2009), and disciplinary power but also a possible source of an ethico-political elsewhere (Guattari 1995)?
Following recent turns to the "global psyche" (Béhague and MacLeish 2020), we ask what it means to address the contemporary condition through the frame of "psychic life." Instead of pre-defining this term, we invite participants to collectively conceptualize both the "psyche" and the forms of "life" to which it might extend. What might an anthropology of "psychic life" add to foundational studies of self (Hallowell 1967), mind and emotion (Levy 1975; Wikan 1990), mental illness (Jenkins 2015), embodiment (Csordas 1990), experience (Throop 2010; Desjarlais 2011), or subjectivity (Biehl et al. 2007; Good et al. 2008; Pandolfo 2018; Stevenson 2014)? In this roundtable, we invite participants to think about the implications of turning to psychic life as an analytical frame for psychological anthropology. We welcome engagements that reflect psychological anthropology's various traditions and literatures.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 9 April, 2021, -Lauren Cubellis (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
Contribution short abstract:
Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Open Dialogue projects in New York City and Berlin, this paper examines what happens when a marginal politics of psychic life -- one tethered to the social polyphony of language -- must contend with the rational demands of local economies and politics of care.
Contribution long abstract:
The Open Dialogue model is a need-adapted approach to psychiatric crisis that originated in Finland (Alanen 2009; Olson et al. 2013). Today, practitioners across the world who find themselves frustrated by what they perceive to be the limits of biomedical psychiatry join this community to learn about a different way of understanding schizophrenia: one that is intersubjective and embedded in language, rather than an imbalance in the brain that can be repaired with medication and hospitalization. These practitioners turn to Bateson (1972) and Bakhtin (1984) to frame schizophrenia as something embedded in social networks, and they understand their therapeutic endeavor to be the stitching together of traumatic experiences for service users who have found themselves lost in a terrain of the unspeakable (Lester 2013; Seikkula and Trimble 2005). The Open Dialogue community proffers a radical and humanistic approach to psychiatry -- but it is a practice that lacks the evidence-base and replicability of standardized global health models; it has yet to be sustainably implemented beyond the original Finnish context (Freeman et al. 2019; Mueser 2019; Rose 2005). Drawing on long-term fieldwork with Open Dialogue projects in New York City and Berlin, this paper examines what happens when a marginal politics of psychic life -- one tethered to the social polyphony of language -- must contend with the rational demands of local economies and politics of care.
Samuele Collu (McGill) Aidan Seale-Feldman (University of Virginia)
Contribution short abstract:
In this co-authored paper we develop a conversation about “psychic life” as an analytical and pedagogical site to engage with the contemporary condition.
Contribution long abstract:
In this co-authored paper we develop a conversation about “psychic life” as an analytical and pedagogical site to engage with the contemporary condition. As opposed to terms like “mental health,” the concept of psychic life provides us with a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Drawing from our fieldwork in Nepal and Argentina, we explore the ethical and political implications of approaching psychological anthropology through the lens of psychic life. Inspired by his work in Argentina with visual technologies and systemic couple’s therapy, Collu considers today’s digital media as an “extimate” psychic infrastructure, which can be addressed through collective forms of psycho-political therapy. In contrast, Seale-Feldman draws her fieldwork on adolescent “mass hysteria” in Nepal to reflect on the limits of subjectivity and the politics of translation between Euro-American and Nepali theories of affliction. In addition to our individual research, together we explore how thinking about psychic life in our pedagogical projects has pushed us to experiment with imaginative practices that can lay the ground for psycho-political elsewhere. In doing so, we discuss why (re)considering the boundaries of the psyche has both therapeutic and pedagogical implications.
Robert Desjarlais (Sarah Lawrence College)
Contribution short abstract:
With this paper, I discuss ongoing research that I am undertaking with a colleague of mine, Khalil Habrih, a sociologist based in France and Canada, on histories of violence in contemporary Paris.
Contribution long abstract:
With this paper, I discuss ongoing research that I am undertaking with a colleague of mine, Khalil Habrih, a sociologist based in France and Canada, on histories of violence in contemporary Paris. With this paper, I discuss ongoing research that I am undertaking with a colleague of mine, Khalil Habrih, a sociologist based in France and Canada, on histories of violence in contemporary Paris. We consider the various ways in which colonial and postcolonial forms of governmentality and the police in France affect the lives – and psychic life – of residents of north Paris. Of particular concern are the ways in which various kinds of violence – from painful memories of the French colonial regime in North Africa to police harassment and humiliating stops-and-searches of young men in north Paris- leave traces and “wounds” among marginalized residents of Paris, which mark the psychic life of peoples and communities. With this discussion I will be drawing from a forthcoming book, co-authored with Khalil Habrih, titled "Traces of Violence: Writings on the Disaster in Paris, France" (University of California Press; fall 2021).
Douglas Hollan (UCLA)
Contribution short abstract:
In different historical moments, different aspects of the relationship between psyche and world have been emphasized. What aspect of this relationship do we want to explore and emphasize now, and why?
Contribution long abstract:
Given the abstract of this roundtable, I will be very interested to explore with participants what “psychic life” might entail, and how such a phenomenon differs or not from other related concepts, such as “self,” “subjectivity,” “ego,” etc. Historically, psychological anthropologists have explored various aspects of psychic or subjective life and experience, and have noted how these aspects are affected by not only by developmental experiences, but also by culture, power, gender, class, and colonial or postcolonial status. In different historical moments, different aspects of the relationship between psyche and world have been emphasized. What aspect of this relationship do we want to explore and emphasize now, and why? Is Nancy Chodorow (2020) right to argue that the time has come to rediscover the interiority of psychic life and its significance for social theory, or do other questions come to the fore in this historical moment?
Emily Ng (University of Amsterdam)
Contribution short abstract:
Juxtaposing ethnographic fieldwork from rural China with the notion of “psychic nowhere” developed in Asian American studies, I consider how the concept might be deployed for rethinking the politics of psychic life across China, ‘greater China,’ and Chinese diasporas.
Contribution long abstract:
Anthropological works have often approached China apart from its diasporic outsides, given a history of disciplinary and conceptual separations. Juxtaposing my ethnographic fieldwork on mediumship and madness in rural China with the recent notion of “psychic nowhere” developed from clinical encounters with a new generation of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. (Eng and Han 2019), I consider how such a psychic nowhere might be deployed as a concept for rethinking the politics of psychic life across China, ‘greater China,’ and Chinese diasporas. This entails revisiting China not as a given entity but as a figure of homeland shaped by ever-shifting mutual imaginaries vis-à-vis the figure of the diasporic. I put this line of thinking in dialogue with recent works on antiblackness to consider how various racial logics of empire, capitalism, and settler colonialism operate to produce distinct, mutually inflected conditions for psychic life.