Abstract
This article examines the cultural practices through which a group of professionals infuse their work and community with charisma. Although previous research has theorized the “charisma of office” (Weber 1978), we know little about how the occupants of such offices sustain it. I focus on a group of psychoanalytically-inclined psychotherapists, whose field, despite its early charismatic beginnings, has been especially embattled in recent decades. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I reveal how they share stories emphasizing their “idealization” by others, draw boundaries between their professional and private lives to manage their work identities, and perform interpersonal affective work that shores up their claims to extraordinary abilities. Together, these cultural practices constitute charisma within the professional group. This article thus makes a case that, as expertise becomes increasingly contested, we must look beyond social organization and the evidentiary bases of knowledge to understand professional authority.
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Notes
This is another term for “psychoanalytic psychotherapist” and I use the two interchangeably. Practitioners distinguish both psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapists from psychoanalysts who are credentialed to practice the more intensive form of this treatment.
Zaretsky (2000) argues that the charisma of psychoanalysis has ebbed and flowed since its emergence, an argument in keeping with Reed’s (2013b) contention that charisma is not a permanent state attached to an individual or group. Rather, it is a performative act or sets of acts that depends on a “spiral of success” (Reed 2013b).
By a Durkheimian logic, this would be an act of “misrecognition” in which a group’s feelings of “collective effervescence” would lead it to attribute special powers to a leader (or totem) that in fact belong to itself (Durkheim [1912]1995; see also Bourdieu 1987). Camic (1980) has argued that such imputations can take on a different tone depending on whether followers’ practices flow from id, ego, or super-ego needs.
Such change is especially likely in conditions of high ambiguity or uncertainty (Friedland 1964; James and Field 1992; Reed 2013b; Thorpe and Shapin 2000; Turner 2003). For example, in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, Nathaniel Bacon took advantage of Governor William Berkeley’s hesitance in a war with Native American tribes and led the rebellion that plunged the state into civil war (Reed 2013b). In the mid-twentieth century, J. Robert Oppenheimer helped keep together the unstable alliance between scientists and the military in the Manhattan project (Thorpe and Shapin 2000). Bacon, Oppenheimer, and other such charismatic leaders drew their force from the affective devotion they inspired in their followers during uncertain times (Camic 1980; Lindholm 1990; Reed 2013b; Shils 1982; Thorpe and Shapin 2000). This is akin to the role that Freud played in the early twentieth century, as he articulated various sources of personal discontent and uncertainty into a coherent theory of self and a set of practices around its mending and discovery (Zaretsky 2000, 2004).
While charismatic and everyday rhythms seem to merge in periods of routinization, genuine charisma is, Eisenstadt contended, “revived again only in situations of extreme and intensive social disorganization and change” (1968, p. xxi).
Ng and Kidder (2010) elaborate a theory of emotive performance by taking politicians as a case.
A priest “cannot mete out penance without becoming an expert in sin” Hughes (1958, p. 79) contended, “else how may he know the moral from the venial”?
As some of the most authoritative interlocutors in the confessional mode, therapists are veritable “technologists of the self,” furthering the project that scholars have attributed to the psychological sciences: the making of modern selfhood (Foucault 1978; Hacking 1995, 1998; Lunbeck 1994; Rose 1990). Though Foucault (1978) emphasized the discursive elements of therapeutic technologies (see also, Rose 1990, 1996), I highlight here their embodied affective dimensions and the cultural practices that set the therapeutic space apart from everyday life.
Video and audio taping remain sources of deep skepticism among psychoanalytic clinicians who are sensitive to anything that may have an impact on the “dynamics” of the therapeutic relationship.
While a majority of psychiatric residents pursued this track in the 1950s, only one to two residents per year joined the local analytic institute in the site where I conducted my fieldwork (see also, Luhrmann 2000). The American Psychoanalytic Association has also registered an absolute decline in the number of trainees (Schechter 2014, p. 24).
There is a great deal of tension in the psychoanalytic community over different definitions of psychoanalysis: Freudians and ego-psychologists reject relational approaches as non-analytic because they rely on the therapeutic relationship as a treatment tool (in contrast to the former who adopt a “neutral” persona that provides interpretations) (for a detailed and insightful discussion of the professional stakes of these differences see Schechter 2014). I eschew a deeper discussion of these differences, as I found them to be inconsequential to this analysis.
Unlike residents training at earlier times (e.g., Bucher 1965; Light 1980; Strauss et al. 1964), participants in this study were not obligated or even strongly advised (in the public fora I observed) to undertake their own therapy. This is partly a function of the decreased emphasis on psychoanalytic practice in their post-training careers.
In fact, the end of “idealization” is considered an essential sign of the patient’s emotional growth and her readiness to exit treatment, as evidenced by the advice that an experienced psychoanalyst gave residents: “The other criteria [for termination] is that the therapeutic relationship is not distorted any longer, the therapist is not denigrated nor idealized, and that ability to see the therapist as a real person, for the patient to say ‘I know you have that quirk but you’re human,’ that ability is to connect to someone else as a whole human being.”
There is some variation along theoretical lines about this stance: Freudian analysts are more likely to espouse the virtues of the “analytic mask” whereas relational analysts favor a more flexible approach around disclosure of affective states and personal information. However, despite these espoused differences, all psychoanalytic therapists talked about sharing emotions through facial expressions (and, in one example given by a relational practitioner, by touching the patient on the arm). Moreover, they all placed personally significant items in their offices (such as works of art, pictures of places they visited, or, rarely, pictures of a child in her early years).
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Acknowledgments
For comments on previous versions of this article, I am grateful to Camilo Leslie, Kim Greenwell, Jason Owen-Smith, Dan Hirschman, Steve Epstein, Andy Junker, Dan Lainer-Vos, Xiaohong Xu, audience members at the panel on “Revolution, routine, and remedy: new work on charisma, culture and power” at the Social Science History Association’s 2013 meeting, and the “Social theory” session at the American Sociological Association’s 2014 meeting.
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Craciun, M. The cultural work of office charisma: maintaining professional power in psychotherapy. Theor Soc 45, 361–383 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9273-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-016-9273-z