Table Of ContentPSYCHOTHERAPY, ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE WORK OF CULTURE
Anthropology and psychotherapy have a long and important historical
relationship, and in this fascinating collection practitioners with experience in
both fields explore how the concept of ‘culture’ is deployed to guide and frame
contemporary therapeutic theory, training and practice.
This task is particularly important as the global spread of psychotherapy,
as both an outgrowth of and a potential point of critique to globalised hyper-
capitalism, requires us to think differently about how to conceptualise cultural
difference in psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy, Anthropology and the Work of Culture provides a valuable resource
for psychotherapeutic professionals working in a world in which cultural
difference appears in fluid and transient moments. It will also provide essential
reading for students and researchers working across the fields of psychotherapy
and anthropology.
Keir Martin is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University
of Oslo and was previously Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of
Manchester. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in East New Britain
Province, Papua New Guinea, and is a member of the British Association for
Counselling and Psychotherapy.
PSYCHOTHERAPY,
ANTHROPOLOGY AND
THE WORK OF CULTURE
Edited by Keir Martin
First published 2019
by Routledge
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© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Keir Martin; individual chapters,
the contributors
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CONTENTS
Author biographies vii
Preface x
Tanja Luhrmann
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
Keir Martin
1 Lessons from the anthropological field: reflecting on where
culture and psychotherapy meet 24
James Davies
2 Overcoming mistrust of the psychological: a history of
psychotherapy in Japan 42
Junko Kitanaka
3 Relating with or without culture 60
Inga-Britt Krause
4 Therapy and the rise of the multicultural 81
Keir Martin
5 History in the psyche, particles in the self: the case of Z 106
Karen Seeley
vi Contents
6 Western configurations: ways of being 121
Salma Siddique
7 Spiraling transference: Ellen West and the case history 139
Vincent Crapanzano
Afterword 156
Sudhir Kakar
Index 161
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Vincent Crapanzano is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Com-
parative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
(CUNY). He has written extensively on psychoanalysis and its application to the
human sciences. His latest book is Recapitulations: A Memoir .
J ames Davies graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006 with a PhD
in Social and Medical Anthropology. He is a Reader in Social Anthropology
and Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton and a practicing psycho-
therapist. He has delivered lectures at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Brown, UCL and
Columbia and has written for The Times , the New Scientist , the Guardian and
Salon . He is author of the bestselling book Cracked: Why Psychiatry Is Doing More
Harm Than Good (Icon), and The Making of Psychotherapists (Karnac). He is
Co-Founder of the Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry.
S udhir Kakar is a psychoanalyst and writer. He has been a lecturer at Harvard
University, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Chicago, McGill, Melbourne,
Hawaii, Vienna, and INSEAD, and Fellow at the Institutes of Advanced Study,
Princeton and Berlin. Kakar is the author of fourteen books of non-fiction and
six novels.
Junko Kitanaka , PhD, is a professor of anthropology in the Department of
Human Sciences at Keio University, Tokyo. She was born and educated in Japan
before obtaining an MA at the University of Chicago and a PhD at McGill
University under Margaret Lock and Allan Young. She has been conducting
research on psychiatry for two decades, collaborating globally with doctors and
anthropologists, teaching in Japan and advising graduate students from the U.S.
and Europe, while helping organize international conferences including the
viii Author biographies
2015 World Congress of Asian Psychiatry. She has received a number of awards,
including the 2007 Dissertation Award from the American Anthropological
Association’s Society for Medical Anthropology. Her dissertation has since been
published by Princeton University Press as a 2012 book titled Depression in Japan:
Psychiatric Cures for a Society in Distress , which won the American Anthropologi-
cal Association’s Francis Hsu Prize for Best Book in East Asian Anthropology
in 2013. The book has been translated by Dr Pierre-Henri Castel at the Uni-
versity of Paris-Descartes and published by D’Ithaque as De la mort voluntaire au
suicide au travail: Histoire et anthropologie de la depression au Japon (2014). She is cur-
rently working on a new project on health screening and preventive medicine in
the workplace; psychotherapy and trauma care in the post-nuclear age; and the
medicalization of the lifecycle (developmental disorders, depression and demen-
tia). Junko has served on the editorial boards of Biosocieties , Medical Anthropology
Quarterly and Cultural Anthropology . Her recent publications include: The Rebirth
of Secrets and the New Care of the Self in Depressed Japan. Current Anthropology
56(12): S251–S262, 2015; Depression as a Problem of Labor: Japanese Debates About
Work, Stress, and a New Therapeutic Ethos ; and Sadness or Depression?: International
Perspectives on the Depression Epidemic and Its Meaning , Jerome Wakefield & Steeves
Demazeux eds. Springer, 2016.
Inga-Britt Krause was trained as a social anthropologist and now works as Con-
sultant Systemic Psychotherapist in the Tavistock & Portman NHS Founda-
tion Trust, where she is also Training & Development Consultant and Lead
for the Systemic Psychotherapy Professional Doctorate programme. Her work
has focused on anti-discrimination in mental health service and psychotherapy
delivery in the National Health Service in the UK and on ‘culture’ as a territory
for resistance and denial in psychotherapy theory and practice.
T anya Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor at Stanford University,
in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her work focuses on the edge of
experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of
psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and
psychotic women and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra
and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who
seek to hear God speak back; with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more
mystical faith; and with people who practice magic. She uses a combination of
ethnographic and experimental methods to understand the phenomenology of
unusual sensory experiences, the way they are shaped by ideas about minds and
persons, and what we can learn from this social shaping that can help us to help
those whose voices are distressing. She was elected to the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award
in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a NYT Notable Book of the Year and
a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. It was awarded the $100,000 Grawe-
meyer Prize for Religion by the University of Louisville. She has published over
Author biographies ix
thirty OpEds in the New York Times , and her work has been featured in the
New Yorker , the N ew York Review of Books , the Times Literary Supplement , Science
News and many other publications. Her new book, Our Most Troubling Madness:
Schizophrenia and Culture , was published by the University of California Press in
October 2016.
K eir Martin, PhD, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Univer-
sity of Oslo. He obtained a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Manches-
ter and later qualified as a psychotherapist. His main areas of research have been
in the field of the relationship between contested subjectivities and emerging
forms of social stratification. He previously worked as a volunteer therapist at
a prison in Greater Manchester. He is currently organising a research project
to look at the spread of psychotherapy in the emerging ‘BRIC’ economies and
works in private psychotherapy practice in Oslo.
K aren Seeley is Lecturer in Anthropology at Columbia University and teaches
in the Psychology Department at Barnard College. She is the author of Cultural
Psychotherapy: Working With Culture in the Clinical Encounter (2000) and T herapy
After Terror: 9/11, Psychotherapists and Mental Health (2008). She has a private psy-
chotherapy practice, working with individuals and couples and specializing in
intercultural treatment.
Salma Siddique, PhD, is Director for Counselling and Psychotherapy in the
School of Education at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. She obtained her
doctorate in anthropology from the University of St. Andrews and later quali-
fied as a psychotherapist and clinical supervisor. Her main research interests are
based on the dialogue between psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and anthropology
and are influenced by her clinical experience working with people in trauma
resulting from torture and fleeing conflict zones. Salma continues to practice as a
volunteer psychotherapist. She supervises trainees and qualified psychotherapists
and counsellors in their practices.
