Lessons from the Anthropological Field: reflecting on where culture and psychotherapy meet


I'm sorry to say that this is seminar is cancelled due to illness. we hope to reschedule it next year.

Via personal reflection on my life as trained psychotherapist and anthropologist, I will scrutinise anthropologically a growing trend within contemporary therapeutic provision, especially with respect to how culture should be understood, managed and responded to in the therapeutic setting. My aim is to articulate a series of propositions, informed by anthropological theory, but broadly inconsistent with today’s increasingly manualised psychotherapeutic trainings, whether such trainings operate in universities, through NHS/IAPT initiatives, or private training institutes. I shall argue that manualised psychotherapeutic training, which aims to attain consistency in results and conations across practitioners, has in this pursuit become increasing culture-blind. Not through failing to articulate a concern for culture, or as is usually put, ‘cultural difference’, but through having become wedded to a concept of culture as something possessed – as something one has, rather than as something one does.