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Love, Stigma, and Resistance: “Therapeutic Microaggressions” in a Prisoners' Wives' Support Group
Author(s) -
Shoshana Avihu
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1002/symb.460
Subject(s) - collectivism , psychology , resistance (ecology) , social psychology , context (archaeology) , psychological intervention , ethnic group , psychotherapist , stigma (botany) , sociology , individualism , psychiatry , ecology , biology , paleontology , political science , anthropology , law
This article derives from ethnographies of therapeutic interventions in a support group for prisoners' wives in Israel. The study's main inductive findings reveal that love and the emotion work of prisoners' wives are constructed as the primary site for achieving the clinical objective: modifying the prisoners' wives' spoiled self and encouraging their adoption of a psychological self. The findings reveal a dramatic clash between the therapeutic emotion work of love that the group facilitators proposed and the collectivist emotion work to which the prisoners' wives subscribed. These forms of emotion work are associated with ethnic hierarchies and experiences of stigmatization by the prisoners' wives during the therapeutic sessions. In this context, the article suggests the concept of “therapeutic microaggressions” to describe how interactions in clinical sessions can reinforce inequality.