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.
Date: 9 March 2020, 20:15 (Monday, 8th week, Hilary 2020)
Venue: Lecture Room, St John's College Research Centre, 45 St Giles'
Speaker: James Davies (Roehampton University)
Organisers: Paul Tod (University of Oxford), Louise Braddock (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Interdisciplinary Seminars in Psychoanalysis
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: The seminar is open free of charge to members of the University and to mental health professionals but space is limited. To attend it is helpful (but not essential) to e-mail paul.tod@sjc.ox.ac.uk
Editor: Paul Tod