Refracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit Dis-Possession.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The notion of affect has generated much confusion in anthropology given its focus on that which seems to escape our language. The evanescent features of affects have irritated many anthropologists who consider affect theory as an empirically weak or esoteric hermeneutics. In this article, I respond to these critiques by developing an anthropology of therapy that foregrounds the role of affects. My intent is to explore the possible contribution of affect theory to medical and psychological anthropology. I draw from my ethnography on couple's therapy in Argentina to suggest that we cannot understand therapeutic efficacy if we focus only on language and discourse. I ask what it means to regard affects as late modern spirits and take psychotherapy as a modern ritual of "affect dispossession." I propose to ask how affects, like spirits, can haunt our present rendering our lives barely livable. Focusing on a session of therapy in Buenos Aires, I describe how a therapist channels the spirit of impasse that colonizes the lives of her patients. Developing an enchanted hermeneutics, I engage with Eve Sedgwick's call for an other-than-paranoid social theory by engaging the imagination as an important organ of perception in the medical anthropology of affects.