Abstract
The notion of affect has generated much confusion in anthropology given its focus on that which seems to escape our language. The evanescent features of affects have irritated many anthropologists who consider affect theory as an empirically weak or esoteric hermeneutics. In this article, I respond to these critiques by developing an anthropology of therapy that foregrounds the role of affects. My intent is to explore the possible contribution of affect theory to medical and psychological anthropology. I draw from my ethnography on couple’s therapy in Argentina to suggest that we cannot understand therapeutic efficacy if we focus only on language and discourse. I ask what it means to regard affects as late modern spirits and take psychotherapy as a modern ritual of “affect dispossession.” I propose to ask how affects, like spirits, can haunt our present rendering our lives barely livable. Focusing on a session of therapy in Buenos Aires, I describe how a therapist channels the spirit of impasse that colonizes the lives of her patients. Developing an enchanted hermeneutics, I engage with Eve Sedgwick’s call for an other-than-paranoid social theory by engaging the imagination as an important organ of perception in the medical anthropology of affects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a genealogy of the psychological disciplines in the Western sphere see Rose (1998, 1999), see also Hacking (1995). On the role of narrative in therapeutic contexts see Carr (2010), Mattingly (1998), Mattingly and Garro (2000). A growing literature has been addressing the role of the “psychological self” beyond the West. See, for instance, recent works on the Chinese “psycho-boom” (Hyde 2017; Hsuan-Ying 2015; Zhang 2018).
See Massumi (1995). As Brian Massumi writes introducing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Spinoza’s affectus [affect] is an “ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another.” Whereas affectio [affection] “is such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body” (1987:xvi).
For a clear exploration of affect theory see Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s excellent introduction to their reader (2010).
I am currently developing the notion of the here-else as a spatio-temporal “unit” of analysis. See “Presencing the Here-else: Affective mediation, Theopolitics, and Therapeutic Dispositifs” American Anthropological Association, 2018, San José, CA.
As wonderfully suggested by anonymous Reviewer #2, my intent is to trouble “the classic tendency to re-interpret the ‘spirits’ of anthropological Others through social scientific frames (which implicitly inherit modern 'disenchanted' theories of the psyche in spite of explicit critiques).”
I am also thinking with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of “late liberal” understood as the governance of difference and markets that has developed as a response to neoliberal socio-economic crises (2016).
The psy-idiom has been considered an Argentinean “secular theodicy” addressing individual malaise together with political and economic crisis (Visacovsky 2009:60). See Mariano Plotkin and Sergio Visacovsky (2008) for a critical reading (cf. Bleichmar 2007). Marsilli-Vargas defines the psychoanalytically inflected structure of attention in Buenos Aires as a listening genre inhabiting ordinary hermeneutics (2014).
The systemic model of psychotherapy was developed in the “cybernetic era” of post-war America, in the context of widespread epistemological interest in self-regulating systems of information. Bateson’s application of cybernetics to communication theories greatly contributed to this approach throughout the 1950s and 1960s in Palo Alto, California (Bateson 2000; Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson 2011).
Following the therapists’ request, under no circumstance I entered in direct contact with the patients in therapy during the course of their treatment.
This might sound like a banality in the post-post “writing culture moment.” However, the flourishing “elective affinity” between medical anthropology and the positivist genres of data production in public/global/mental health might call for a reiteration of this point.
All names and major details have been changed. Simona and Enrique agreed to be observed. I changed the names of the psychotherapists to further protect their privacy. I provide my translation from Spanish to English of the therapy sessions and of the interviews. To keep a sense of the translation, I am leaving in italics a few Spanish words. The italics do not indicate code switching.
On the role this visual model played in the development of the “family form” the U.S. see Deborah Weinstein (2013). See also Collu (n.d.) for an analysis of “visual dispositifs” and the therapeutic role of screens in this setting. Surveillance studies have troubled the panoptic model of vision, showing how the heterogeneous orientations of gazes render impossible a unidirectional visual control. Following the intensification of surveilling strategies after 9/11 (Lyon 2003), these literatures explore the proliferation of “surveillant assemblages” as forms of power that cannot be attributed to one single “Orwellian Big Brother” (Ericson and Haggerty 2006). Recent studies consider how visual or non-visual monitoring technologies for medical patients entangle everyday surveillance with forms of care delivery allowing (rather than thwarting) individual agency, self-development, and home care (Dubbeld 2006). Through ethnographic accounts of therapeutic, clinical, and home nursing spaces, these works show how “caring practices include technology” (Mol, Moser and Pols 2010:14) and thus challenge the idea that surveilling technologies cannot deliver forms of care.
See further on cruel optimism and the romantic couple as a cluster of promises.
I am thinking with Arlie Russell Hochschild about avoidance of coming back home to avoid “more work” in a reversal between home and work (1997).
I am here referring to Bateson’s definition of the elementary unit of information as a “difference which makes a difference” (2000:459). See also Eduardo Kohn (2013: 100) on difference and semiotic ecologies. Thinking with Gilles Deleuze, “intensity is difference” within an affective milieu (1994:223).
I refer here to Martin Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world” as grounded on a fundamentally ec-static body, a body that is outside of itself, thrown into the world and always already occupied by it (2008). “Availability” plays a central role in my understanding of the relation between affects and dispositifs (2018). The idiom of availability is a gift from a series of pleasurably baroque conversations with my mentor Lawrence Cohen (see Cohen 2007).
I am making a direct reference to Anne Fadiman’s book title (1998).
Similarly, Brennan proposed to understand Christian demons as circulating through (olfactory) affects (2004).
I am here thinking about Crapanzano’s suggestion that “spirits are concepts” (1977).
For the sake of the argument, I am addressing an ideal–typical notion of the modern “self” as a bounded and “unique” entity (see Geertz in Rose 1998: 5). The psy-disciplines and medicine have been “integral to the secular project of making invisible the religious affects and sensibilities of the modern political/biological individual” thus shaping a bounded self (Whitmarsh and Roberts 2016: 207). However, this “secular” self bears the traces of an ongoing relationship with multiple religious traditions (see Asad 2003, Mahmood 2005, Taylor 2007). I am here drawing from conversations with Ian Whitmarsh and his recent call for a “non-secular” medical anthropology which addresses a repressed religious kernel of modern medicine, psychology, and contemporary regimes of the self.
The term Thanatos itself was not introduced by Freud himself but by post-Freudian psychoanalysis. See Pandolfo (2018: 91) on identification and affects. Bringing in dialogue the Islamic tradition with psychoanalysis, Stefania Pandolfo’s recent work activates the capacity of psychoanalysis to address forms of spirit possession within and beyond the Western tradition (ibid).
I understand this type of ghostly presence as a virtual screen that filters our lived experience of the present (2016).
On the affect of depression and its relationship with the Christian capital sin of “acedia” see Cvetkovitch (2012).
Of course, Simona and Enrique, who come together as a couple – an imaginary unit – have different angles of arrival and departure from their shared affect.
Exploring healing rituals across cultural settings, historian of psychoanalysis Henri Ellenberger has suggested that we should consider a continuity between shamanic rituals of dispossession, hypnotic magnetism, and the development of psychoanalysis (1970). Freud, in Ellenberger’s reading, is to be considered the heir of shamanistic rituals addressing the “maladies of the soul.”
The Argentinean “middle class” is an ambiguous and “residual” category (Adamovsky, Visacovsky, and Vargas 2014:115) as the majority of the Argentinean population recognizes itself as being part of it. Tied to nationalistic origin stories, the Argentinean middle class catalyzes a moral imaginary of white and modern migrants of European descent who “built” the country (see Visacovsky and Garguin 2009). The “middle class” emerged in the public discourse as the main protagonist of the 2001-2002 crisis (Visacovsky 2014:224). On one side actively engaged in the cacerolazos (spontaneous street protests), on the other called out for its neoliberal practices of consumption that metonymically represented the “sins” of the nation (Fava and Zenobi 2014).
In the systemic model of therapy, the leading therapist usually takes one break during the session to debrief with the observing team.
See Ahmed on the couple form and its regimes of “straight” availability (2006).
On the parallel between psychotherapy and exorcism see also the work of Thomas Csordas (2017). In a sense, the exorcist “naming” of spirits can be paralleled to our understanding of “diagnosis” in the widest sense. Medical Anthropology often engaged with “diagnosis” in its capacity to be therapeutically effective in itself. See, for example, the work of Byron Good (1994). However, I wonder if the affective “discernment of spirits” I am referring to should be distinguished farther from a diagnostic gesture.
Elsewhere I explore the ethnographic method as based on a temporal “genre of presence” (n.d.).
On affects, trance, and healing rituals I am thinking with Borch-Jacobsen’s notion of “mimetic efficacy” (1993).
Favret-Saada also suggested that an anthropology of therapy should consider dewitching rituals as different in degree but not in kind in respect to contemporary psychotherapy (2015).
On ritual healing see the recent work of Laurence Kirmayer who develops a general theory of ritual healing through the exploration of the “placebo response” (2016).
See also Ahmed (2010: 36).
I am thinking about a conversation I had with Gregory Delaplace on the relationship between ghosts, apparitions, and dispositifs (see Delaplace 2013, 2018). I am deeply in debt to many inspiring conversations with Eduardo Kohn on cosmic diplomacy, “good” and “bad” spirits, and eco-philosophical thoughts about the other-than human.
See Mazzarella (2009).
In her first book about sorcellerie in the Bocage, Favret-Saada implied that you can write about affects only when you are “getting caught” and becoming an ethnographic medium (1981). Works on religious experience and spirit possession provide new perspectives on mediating mediums in relation to the production of immanence/presence. See Birgit Meyer on the paradoxes of immediacy (2011) and Rosalind Morris on dis-embodied mediums (2002, 2014). Thinking about mediums and affects, Steven Shaviro writes that media are “machines for generating affects” (2010:3, original emphasis). I am also thinking about the work of Peter Skafish, who foregrounds the concept-work of channeling mediums (2016). I am currently working on an essay on the relation between affects and dispositifs (see Collu 2018).
Karen Barad has examined the epistemological and ontological breaks between reflection, refraction, and diffraction in her anthropological quantum physics (2007).
Similarly, in her queer phenomenology Ahmed writes about “perversion points” that articulate a bending of “straight lines” (2006).
I am thinking here, for example, about the “madness of the gods” amidst the Thonga as described by Luc de Heusch (1985), where the possessed are liberated from the evil spirit mimetically embodying the spirit itself. The spirit becomes present because it is channeled through the affective body of the possessed (Borch-Jacobsen 1993). See also the classic work by Alfred Mètraux on Voodoo rituals (1994).
On the imagination as a site of knowledge production and the mundo imaginalis as a faculty of the soul see Stefania Pandolfo’s recent work (2018). Giorgio Agamben writes about the “destruction of experience” after medieval times and the progressive separation of the imagination from experience (2007).
References
Adamovsky, Ezequiel, Sergio Eduardo Visacovsky, and Patricia Beatriz Vargas. 2014. Clases medias: nuevos enfoques desde la sociología, la historia y la antropología. Buenos Aires: Ariel.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience. London: Verso.
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. Happy Objects. In Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader, pp. 29–51. Durham: Duke University Press.
Anderson, Ben. 2009. Affective Atmospheres. ResearchGate 2 (2): 77–81. 10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. 1st ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Belting, Hans 2011 An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books.
Bleichmar, Silvia. 2007. Dolor país y después. Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal.
Blustein, Paul. 2006. And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out) Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina. New York: Public Affairs.
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1993. The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis, and Affect. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Breuer, Joseph, and Sigmund Freud 2000 Studies on Hysteria. Reissue edition. New York: Basic Books.
Brotherton, P. Sean. 2016. Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. In Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright, and Anita Hardon (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology, pp. 102–106. London: Routledge.
Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cohen, Lawrence 2007 Operability, Bioavailability, and Exception. In Global Assemblages, Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, eds., pp. 79–90. Oxford: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470696569.ch5/.
Collu, Samuele 2006 L’Assenza Presente di Buddha. Statue e Persone Nel Monasto Cambogiano Di K. Bologna: Tesi di Laurea, Università di Bologna.
Collu, Samuele 2016 Refractive Cogito. An Ethnography of Relational Imagination. Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Collu, Samuele 2018 Late Modern Spirits Affect, Dispossession, and Therapeutic Dispositifs. Paper Presented at the American Anthropological Association, San Jose, CA.
Collu, Samuele n.d. A Therapy of Screens. Psychotherapy and the Visual Apparatus. Article Manuscript.
Collu, Samuele n.d. Cogito Interruptus. From Reflexive Modes to Refractive Moods. Article Manuscript.
Cooper, Marianne. 2014. Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 1992. Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Crapanzano, Vincent, and Vivian Garrison. 1977. Case Studies in Spirit Possession. New York: Wiley.
Csordas, Thomas 2017 (June 23) The Impossibility of the Inert: Placebo and the Essence of Healing Somatosphere. Accessed December 6, 2018. http://somatosphere.net/2017/06/the-impossibility-of-the-inert-placebo-and-the-essence-of-healing.html.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.
D’Avella, Nicholas. 2014. Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina. Cultural Anthropology 29(1): 173–199. 10.14506/ca29.1.10.
de Certeau, Michel 2000 [1970] The Possession at Loudun. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
de Heusch, Luc. 1985. Sacrifice in Africa: A Structuralist Approach. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Martino, Ernesto De. 2005. The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism. London: Free Association Books.
de Spinoza, Benedict. 2005. Ethics. London: Penguin Classics.
Delaplace, Grégory. 2013. What the Invisible Looks Like Ghosts, Perceptual Faith, and Mongolian Regimes of Communication. In R. Blanes and D. E. Santo (eds.), The Social Life of Spirits, pp. 52–58. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Delaplace, Grégory. 2018. “Les fantômes sont des choses qui arrivent. Surgissement des morts et apparitions spectrales.” Terrain. Anthropologie & Sciences Humaines, 69(April): 4–23. 10.4000/terrain.16608
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Desjarlais, Robert. 2018. The Blind Man: A Phantasmography. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dow, James. 1986. Universal Aspects of Symbolic Healing: A Theoretical Synthesis. American Anthropologist 88(1): 56–69.
Dubbeld, Lynsey. 2006. Telemonitoring of Cardiac Patients: User-Centred Research as Input for Surveillance Theories. In David Lyon (ed.), Theorizing Surveillance, pp. 182–205. London: Routledge.
Durkheim, Emile 1995 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Translated by Karen E. Fields. Reprint edition. New York: Free Press.
Ellenberger, Henri F. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Ericson, Richard Victor, and Kevin D. Haggerty, eds. 2006. The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Fadiman, Anne. 1998. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Fava, Ricardo, and Diego Zenobi 2014 Moral, Política y Clase Media. Intelectuales y Saberes En Tiempos de Crisis. In Moralidades, Economías e Identidades de Clase Media: Estudios Históricos y Etnográficos, pp. 217–246. Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne 1981 Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Translated by Catherine Cullen. Reissue edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Favret-Saada, Jeanne 2015 The Anti-Witch. Chicago: Hau Books.
Freud, Sigmund. 1995. Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’). In Peter Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader, pp. 172–238. New York: Norton.
Freud, Sigmund 2001 The Dynamics of Transference. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New Edition, XII, pp. 97–108. London: Vintage Classics.
Freud, Sigmund. 2002. Civilization and Its Discontents. London: Penguin.
Freud, Sigmund 2010 The Interpretation of Dreams: The Complete and Definitive Text. Translated by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books.
Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.) 2010 The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Hacking, Ian. 1995. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2008. Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1997. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Macmillan.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell 2012 The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Third Edition. Updated with a New Preface Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hsuan-Ying, Huang 2015 From Psychotherapy to Psycho-Boom: A Historical Overview of Psychotherapy in China. In Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in China, 1, pp. 1–30. New York: Routledge.
Hyde, Sandra Teresa. 2017. ‘Spending My Own Money, Harming My Own Body’: Addiction Care in a Chinese Therapeutic Community. Medical Anthropology 36 (1): 61–76. 10.1080/01459740.2016.1148032.
Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Illouz, Eva. 2013. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. 1 edition. Cambridge: Polity.
Kirmayer, Laurence J. 2016. Unpacking the Placebo Response: Insights from Ethnographic Studies of Healing. In Amir Raz and Cory Harris (eds.), Placebo Talks: Modern Perspectives on Placebo in Society, pp. 119–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Klein, Melanie. 2002. Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kwon, Heonik. 2008. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern, 1st edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 2008. Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Lyon, David. 2003. Surveillance After September 11. Cambridge: Polity.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press
Manoukian, Setrag. 2017. A Vocabulary for the Impersonal. In L. Stone and J.B. Mohaghegh (eds) Manifestos for World Thought. London: Springer.
Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. 2014. “Listening Genres: The Emergence of Relevance Structures through the Reception of Sound.” Journal of Pragmatics, Towards an Emancipatory Pragmatics Part Three, 69 (August): 42–51. 10.1016/j.pragma.2014.03.006.
Marsilli-Vargas, Xochitl. 2016. The Offline and Online Mediatization of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Signs and Society 4 (1): 135–53. 10.1086/685822.
Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, 31: 83–109. 10.2307/1354446.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl. 1998. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mattingly, Cheryl, and Linda C. Garro. 2000. Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mazzarella, William. 2009. Affect: What Is It Good For. In Saurabh Dube (ed.), Enchantments of Modernity: Empire, Nation, Globalization, pp. 291–309. New Delhi: Routledge India.
Mazzarella, William. 2017. The Mana of Mass Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mètraux, Alfred. 1994. Voodoo in Haiti. Gifkendorf: Merlin-Verlag.
Meyer, Birgit. 2011. “Mediation and Immediacy: Sensational Forms, Semiotic Ideologies and the Question of the Medium.” Social Anthropology 19 (1): 23–39. 10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00137.x.
Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and Jeannette Pols. 2010. Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes and Farms. Vol. 8. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.
Morris, Rosalind C. 2002. Mediation and Mediumship in Thailand’s Information Age. In Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (eds.) Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, pp. 383–98. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morris, Rosalind C. 2014. On the Subject of Spirit Mediumship in the Age of New Media. In Heike Behrend, Anja Dreschke, and Martin Zillinger (eds.), Trance Mediums and New Media, pp. 25–55. New York: Fordham University Press.
Muir, Sarah. 2015. The Currency of Failure: Money and Middle-Class Critique in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires. Cultural Anthropology 30(2): 310–35.
Muir, Sarah. 2016. On Historical Exhaustion: Argentine Critique in an Era of ‘Total Corruption.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (1): 129–58. 10.1017/S0010417515000596.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 1993. The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ng, Emily Forthcoming A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Mediumship, and the Ghost after Mao. Oakland: University of California Press.
Pandolfo, Stefania. 2018. Knot of the Soul. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Plotkin, Mariano. 2001. Freud in the Pampas: The Emergence and Development of a Psychoanalytic Culture in Argentina. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Plotkin, Mariano 2003 Argentina on the Couch: Psychiatry, State, and Society, 1880 to the Present. Edited by Mariano Plotkin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Plotkin, Mariano, and Sergio E. Visacovsky. 2008. Los psicoanalistas y la crisis, la crisis del psicoanálisis. JAMA, 4(1): 149–63.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Price, Jason 2015 The Deliverance of Jacob K. Paper Presented at the Society of Anthropology of Religion, San Diego, CA.
Reinhardt, Bruno. 2015. A Christian Plane of Immanence. JAMA 5(1): 405–436. 10.14318/hau5.1.019
Romero, Simon 2012 Do Argentines Need Therapy? Pull Up a Couch. The New York Times, August 18, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/world/americas/do-argentines-need-therapy-pull-up-a-couch.html.
Rose, Nikolas S. 1998. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Reprint). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rose, Nikolas S. 1999. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free Association Books.
Scheff, Thomas. 2001. Catharsis in Healing, Ritual, and Drama. Lincoln, NE: Universe.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Severi, Carlo. 2002. Memory, Reflexivity and Belief. Reflections on the Ritual Use of Language. Social Anthropology 10(1): 23–40.
Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester: John Hunt Publishing.
Skafish, Peter. 2016. From The Library of The Superreal: The Metaphysics and Consciousness of an American ‘Channel.’ Common Knowledge 22 (3): 431–52.
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. Atmospheric Attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–453. 10.1068/d9109.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2017. In the World That Affect Proposed. Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 192–98. 10.14506/ca32.2.03.
Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tedlock, Barbara. 1991. From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography. Journal of Anthropological Research 47 (1): 69–94.
Tomkins, Silvan S. 1995 Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
Turner, Victor Witter. 1995. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
Vezzetti, Hugo. 1996. Aventuras de Freud en el país de los argentinos: De José Ingenieros a Enrique Pichón-Rivière. Buenos Aires: Paidós.
Visacovsky, Sergio. 2009. La Constitución de Un Sentido Práctico Del Malestar Cotidiano y El Lugar Del Psicoanálisis En La Argentina. Cuicuilco 16 (45): 51–78.
Visacovsky, Sergio 2010 ‘Hasta La Proxima Crisis’: Historia Cíclica, Virtudes Genealógicas y La Identidad de Clase Media Entre Los Afectados Por La Debacle Financiera En La Argentina (2001–2002). CIDE Documentos de Trabajo 43.
Visacovsky, Sergio Eduardo, and Enrique Garguin. 2009. Moralidades, economías e identidades de clase media: estudios históricos y etnográficos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia.
Watzlawick, Paul, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don D. Jackson. 2011. Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of Interactional Patterns, Pathologies and Paradoxes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Weinstein, Deborah. 2013. The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy. Cornell Studies in the History of Psychiatry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Whitmarsh, Ian, and Elizabeth F. S. Roberts. 2016. Nonsecular Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology 35 (3): 203–8. 10.1080/01459740.2015.1118099.
Zhang, Li. 2018. “Cultivating the Therapeutic Self in China.” Medical Anthropology 37 (1): 45–58. 10.1080/01459740.2017.1317769.
Zigon, Jarrett. 2019 A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community. University of California Press.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to the therapists and patients who generously allowed me to participate in their professional and personal lives. Micol has been an amazing source of affective inspiration together with the therapists I call here Almibar, Wanda, and Clara. Thank you. The conceptual gifts of Lawrence Cohen, Ian Whitmarsh, Stefania Pandolfo, and Yanina Gori are always already present in this article. Bruno Reinhardt, Dylan Fagan, Cheryl Smith, Mila Djordjevic, Gabriel Coren, Jarret Zigon, Silvia Tidney, Jason Throop, Cristiana Giordano, Vanessa McCuaig, Cristina Yepez, Amélie Ward, Emad Mortazavi, Vincent Laliberté, and Robert Desjarlais, provided important comments to different versions of this manuscript. Emily Ng has been fundamental. Haley Baird reframed my imagination about the work of therapy, love, and spirits.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The author has received the International Fieldwork Grant from the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, to undertake the fieldwork research this article is based on (2013). The author states that there is no conflict of interest influencing the article’s content.
Ethical Approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The research was approved by the UC Berkeley Human Research protection Program.
Informed Consent
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Collu, S. Refracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit Dis-Possession. Cult Med Psychiatry 43, 290–314 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-018-9616-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-018-9616-5