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The place of therapy: between lab and field in the psychoanalytic office
Author(s) -
Craciun Mariana
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.12977
Subject(s) - psychoanalytic theory , materiality (auditing) , scholarship , unconscious mind , field (mathematics) , ethnography , sociology , psychology , everyday life , psychoanalysis , psychotherapist , epistemology , aesthetics , political science , anthropology , philosophy , mathematics , pure mathematics , law
Abstract This article builds on recent scholarship in medicine, science and technology illuminating the role of place and materiality in medical work. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with US psychiatrists, psychologists and clinical social workers, I examine how the therapy office shapes psychoanalytic psychotherapists’ efforts to understand their patients’ unconscious conflicts. The concepts of ‘laboratory’ and ‘field’ frame my discussion of the material set up of the clinical room and the relational practices it fosters. I show that psychoanalytic practitioners try to approximate ‘laboratory conditions’ that insulate patients’ problems from their everyday contexts and ensure a sense of stability. I also demonstrate that these clinicians’ work depends on revealing personal preferences in the therapy room and fostering therapeutic relationships that resemble those in patients’ everyday lives, making the office akin to the ‘field’. The office thus becomes epistemically productive through therapists’ management of the paradoxical relationship between laboratory and field.