Refracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit Dis-Possession.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry June 1, 2019 Samuele Collu 39 citations
Affect theory has been criticized in anthropology for focusing on what seems to escape language, but this article argues that understanding therapeutic efficacy requires attending to affects, not just language and discourse. Drawing on ethnography of couple's therapy in Argentina, the author suggests regarding affects as late modern spirits and psychotherapy as a ritual of affect dispossession. A therapy session in Buenos Aires shows how a therapist channels the spirit of impasse that colonizes patients' lives. The article develops an enchanted hermeneutics, engaging imagination as an organ of perception in medical anthropology of affects, and responds to Eve Sedgwick's call for an other-than-paranoid social theory.