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

Area of Science:

• Medical Anthropology
• Psychological Anthropology
• Social Theory

Background:

• Affect theory faces critiques in anthropology for being empirically weak or esoteric.
• Traditional approaches often overlook the role of affects, focusing solely on language and discourse.
• There is a need to integrate affect theory into medical and psychological anthropology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an anthropology of therapy that emphasizes the significance of affects.
• To explore the contribution of affect theory to medical and psychological anthropology.
• To analyze psychotherapy as a ritual of "affect dispossession" and its impact on lived experience.

Main Methods:

• Ethnographic research on couple's therapy in Argentina.
• Analysis of a therapy session in Buenos Aires focusing on the "spirit of impasse."
• Engaging with Eve Sedgwick's concept of "other-than-paranoid" social theory.

Main Results:

• Therapeutic efficacy cannot be fully understood by focusing only on language and discourse.
• Affects can be conceptualized as "late modern spirits" that "haunt" present lives.
• The imagination serves as a crucial organ of perception in the medical anthropology of affects.

Conclusions:

• An "enchanted hermeneutics" is proposed to understand the role of affects in therapy.
• Affect theory offers valuable insights for medical and psychological anthropology.
• Integrating affect and imagination is key to a more comprehensive understanding of therapeutic processes.