Contratherapy: a very premature introduction
The following was written as a brief thesis-in-progress summary for the purposes of this event with the Therapy and Social Change Network. Please note that this writing is very much ‘in the middle’ of development, and will likely change significantly by the time it is submitted. Please take the following not as a destination, but as a signpost pointing some ways out - if you feel moved, I encourage you to read the mentioned texts.
That said, I would love to get feedback as it develops, critical or supportive - please feel free to engage with it in the comments, and help me build it. I will try to honestly engage with any feedback and can cite you if appropriate.
(Also, I won’t have the time to do proper citations and a bibliography for these before the event, but may edit them in later.)
Contratherapy: Liberatory Praxis for Otherwise Worlds
This thesis, taking to heart the challenge to examine what our psychotherapy practices are (re)producing within ourselves and society, aims to offer a broad cartography of the psychotherapeutic industry and its discourses and a re-envisioning of many of its fundamental assumptions, towards the creation of an otherwise psychotherapy resistant to the imperializing 'image of thought', towards more emancipatory practices, and towards otherwise worlds.
My guiding questions are:
In what ways do the psychotherapy industry and its discourses reinforce systems of social oppression? How do they act in the reproduction and maintenance of the existing social order?
How do these processes of oppressive reproduction play out at the level of subjectivity-production? In what ways do the dominant modes of psychotherapy theory and practice - or, 'majoritarian psychotherapy' - render us as docile, subjugated, and restricted subjects?
Is an emancipatory psychotherapy, one which can effectively contribute to personal and social emancipation, possible? How might it work?
Would such an emancipatory psychotherapy still maintain the 'frame' of existing models, or is an entirely different form needed?
Structurations
To illustrate what I’m reaching for here, I would like to start with a foundational concept, which I will call “structurations” (which I believe has parallels to Giddens' 'structuration theory', but I’m not yet familiar enough with it to claim allegiance). A ‘structuration’, for our purposes, is a process of organizing reality. ‘Structurations’ could be seen as a more immanent reframing of ‘social constructs’, a concept which proves to be a bit too abstracted for our purposes. I think this distinction may be well captured in the frustration that arises when we say things like ‘race is a social construct’. Let’s contrast this with: “race is a structuration.” Race, by this lens, becomes a way of structuring society, a way of structuring persons, and more expansively, a way of structuring the material world. It eventually becomes reified into ‘structures’ that we call ‘races’, but I think we are doing ourselves a disservice to think of ‘race’ as starting out as some abstracted ‘thing’ or ‘quality’: rather, to racialize is a process of relating which produces ‘races’. The abstracted concept that we now call ‘race’ emerged out of processes of structuring the world, which were ostensibly material: enclosure, conquest, land appropriation, nation-building, resource extraction, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide. These structurations are not artifacts of the past - they are carried forward in our ways of relating to ourselves, each other, and the world.
To think in terms of “structurations” is to interrogate the very processes which shape reality, in which we are constantly imbricated as agents. I think that if we wish to change our reality, we must unsettle the structurations which actively shape it, a shaping which has become sedimented along lines of race, gender, sexuality, sanity, ability, the ‘human’, and all other forms of enclosure. To think in terms of structurations brings us closer into a philosophy of immanence, which prompts a fundamental shift in our onto-epistemologies from seeing the world in terms of abstracted ‘essences’ and ‘things’ to seeing the world in terms of intraconnected and embodied processes. We are moving further into the territory of a process ontology here, which reorients our questions. Of a process, we do not ask, “What does it mean?”, but rather, “How does it work?” and “What is it doing?” We are moving beyond an ontology of 'essences': the search for essences amidst the ever-shifting flows of processes proves as useful as grabbing handfuls of water in the effort to hold a river.
If we want to bring about otherwise psychotherapies, I believe we must critically analyze how psychotherapy is caught up in the structuration of the world, a structuration which is ostensibly tied to the humanist philosophies from which it emerges from and which it, in turn, upholds. This calls for a fundamental re-examination of our theories and practices, and an interrogation of what they are producing within us, within our relationships, and within the world at large. This work is undeniably unsettling: it calls into question many of the humanistic assumptions which shape our way of thinking about ourselves, others, and our ways of relating. It asks of us to become abolitionists, which, as Moten and Harney illustrate, is less an act of wanton destruction than it is the creation of another world where existing systems are rendered unnecessary. A world which would not need prisons; a world which would not need the psy-complex. This is, by nature, leaning us into 'theory which offends', which unsettles us, and in the unsettling, opens us to becoming otherwise. But ultimately, I do not believe that what I'm aiming for here is particularly 'radical': in the words of Guy Debord, the following “should be read bearing in mind that it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society. There was never anything outrageous, however, about what it had to say.”
Overview
This thesis, then, is interested in examining and unsettling many of the structurations that I find psychotherapy imbricated in. For now, I am focusing on three thematic 'plateaus' (borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari), which are by no means neat or distinct, but rather interconnect (among many other factors) to give shape to the ‘order of things’ proper to psychotherapy under the regime of humanism. The three plateaus I focus on are Enclosure, Governance, and Recognition.
Enclosure (or, Subject)
The first plateau, Enclosure (or, Subject), draws on the works of counter-humanist and anti-colonial theorists to explore the structuration of the 'human': the image-form around which all of our political arrangements are organized. I draw on Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter's work on 'sociogeny' to explore how the human subject is created in relation to a dehumanized Other, and how we in turn constantly create our 'selves' in relation. I tie this into Achille Mbembe's concept of 'enclosure', which follows the development of this human subject across its material roots in history through slavery, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. I explore how the systems of enclosure which emerged alongside these atrocities gave rise to the construct of the 'human' today, and to our very ways of encountering and thinking about our 'selves'. I then explore the implications for psychotherapy, and how we might reach for a psychotherapy of 'dis-enclosure' which might disrupt the structurations of humanism, towards an 'Open World'.
Primary influences:
MDC - Establishing an Immanent Counterhumanism
Frantz Fanon - Black Skin, White Masks
Sylvia Wynter - Towards the Sociogenic Principle
Achille Mbembe - Critique of Black Reason
Sam Coombes - Edouard Glissant: A Poetics of Resistance
La Marr Jurelle Bruce - How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind
Governance (or, Control)
The second plateau, Governance (or, Control), draws on post-Foucauldian analyses of power to explore how psychotherapy becomes imbricated in myriad forms of social control aligned with neoliberal and state power. This territory has been well-explored by theorists such as Nikolas Rose, Ian Parker, and the anti-psychiatry movement, so I will only briefly summarize them here. I expand their work by drawing on later theorists of governance such as Fred Moten, Sara Ahmed, and Byung-Chul Han, who give us frameworks for challenging the more dispersed forms of power we find in neoliberal society, where control manifests as 'psychic managerialism' and in discourses such as the 'self-as-entrepreneur' or demands for a 'happy' life. I explore how, through these exertions of power, we are created as docile subjects who even come to desire our own oppression. I then explore modes of psychotherapy which might resist state and neoliberal governance, towards a psychotherapy of 'fugitivity'.
Primary influences:
Nikolas Rose - Governing the Soul
Ian Parker - Psy-Complex in Question
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney - The Undercommons
Sara Ahmed - The Cultural Politics of Emotion/The Promise of Happiness
Byung-Chul Han - Psychopolitics
Marquis Bey - Anarcho-Blackness/Black Trans Feminism
Recognition (or, Relate)
The third plateau, Recognition (or, Relate), draws on the work of Gilles Deleuze and his many theoretical allies to examine how our therapeutic practices reproduce the 'dogmatic image of thought' which fixes us into restricted ways of thinking, being, and relating. I begin with an outline of Deleuze's critiques of representational thought, and explore how these critiques trouble notions such as 'empathy' and 'mutual recognition'. I then tie this into anti-colonial critiques of recognition across the political sphere, which examine how efforts towards recognition often become tools for enacting colonial violence and reinforcing the established social order. I explore the implications for ways of relating within psychotherapy, towards psychotherapy as a site of 'affective encounter', and towards a 'psychotherapy of the limit'.
Primary influences:
Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari - Anti-Oedipus/A Thousand Plateaus
Glen Coulthard - Red Skin, White Masks
Lara and Steven Sheehi - Psychoanalysis Under Occupation
Avgi Saketopoulou - Sexuality Beyond Consent
Rosi Braidotti - Nomadic Subjects
In the next post, I will offer a (draft, early) sample from the plateau of ‘Recognition’.