Psychotherapy Anthropology and the

Work of Culture 1st Edition Keir Martin

(Editor)
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/psychotherapy-anthropology-and-the-work-of-culture-
1st-edition-keir-martin-editor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Psychology and Psychotherapy in the Perspective of

Christian Anthropology 1st Edition Nicolene Joubert

https://ebookmeta.com/product/psychology-and-psychotherapy-in-
the-perspective-of-christian-anthropology-1st-edition-nicolene-
joubert/

The Moral Work of Anthropology Ethnographic Studies of

Anthropologists at Work 1st Edition Hanne Overgaard
Mogensen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-moral-work-of-anthropology-
ethnographic-studies-of-anthropologists-at-work-1st-edition-
hanne-overgaard-mogensen/

Weapons Culture and the Anthropology Museum 1st Edition

Tom Crowley

https://ebookmeta.com/product/weapons-culture-and-the-
anthropology-museum-1st-edition-tom-crowley/

Anthropology of Race Genes Biology and Culture 1st

Edition John Hartigan (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/anthropology-of-race-genes-biology-
and-culture-1st-edition-john-hartigan-editor/
Modelwork The Material Culture of Making and Knowing
1st Edition Martin Brückner

https://ebookmeta.com/product/modelwork-the-material-culture-of-
making-and-knowing-1st-edition-martin-bruckner/

Food Culture Anthropology Linguistics and Food Studies

1st Edition Janet Chrzan

https://ebookmeta.com/product/food-culture-anthropology-
linguistics-and-food-studies-1st-edition-janet-chrzan/

Introducing Anthropology of Religion Culture to the

Ultimate 3rd Edition Jack David Eller

https://ebookmeta.com/product/introducing-anthropology-of-
religion-culture-to-the-ultimate-3rd-edition-jack-david-eller/

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture An

Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology
Medicine and Psychiatry Arthur Kleinman

https://ebookmeta.com/product/patients-and-healers-in-the-
context-of-culture-an-exploration-of-the-borderland-between-
anthropology-medicine-and-psychiatry-arthur-kleinman/

Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and

Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder Arthur
Kleinman (Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/culture-and-depression-studies-in-
the-anthropology-and-cross-cultural-psychiatry-of-affect-and-
disorder-arthur-kleinman-editor/
PSYCHOTHERAPY, 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 f luid 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
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Keir Martin; individual chapters,
the contributors
The right of Keir Martin to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-18245-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-18251-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-06031-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS

Author biographies vii

Preface x
Tanja Luhrmann
Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1
Keir Martin

1 Lessons from the anthropological field: ref lecting 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.

James 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.

Sudhir 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.

Tanya 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 New 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.

Keir 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.

Karen 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 Therapy
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 inf luenced by her clinical experience working with people in trauma
resulting from torture and f leeing conf lict zones. Salma continues to practice as a
volunteer psychotherapist. She supervises trainees and qualified psychotherapists
and counsellors in their practices.
PREFACE

The time has come for anthropologists and psychotherapists to pay serious atten-
tion to each other. This may not seem obvious. The resonances between the two
endeavors is evident to those who know both, but to those who do not, the idea
that they should learn from each other might seem not only confused but even
repugnant. The critical, assumption-challenging stance of anthropology can seem
threatening to psychotherapists seeking to assert empirical validity to medical sci-
ence. The focus on the psychological can seem wrong-headed to anthropologists
focused on power and social structure.
Yet what therapists and ethnographers do is remarkably alike. Both involve
participant observation. At least, ethnography straightforwardly involves the
attempt to participate, to the extent possible, as a member of the group the eth-
nographer has come to study, and the attempt to observe what one must do in
order to be recognized as a member of that group. On the surface, psychotherapy
does not seem like that at all – except that in practice it is so similar that Harry
Stack Sullivan actually called it “participant observation.” His premise was that
the psychotherapist is not the Freudian blank screen, on which the patient proj-
ects his fantasies. Instead, the psychotherapist is better understood as a person
who enters into the life world of the patient as an interlocutor, with the goal of
observing it closely enough that they can describe what they learn about the life-
world’s implicit rules and expectations. Meanwhile, the skills of ethnographic
observation bear some resemblance to the skills of clinical observation and to
some extent are taught in a similar manner, through apprenticeship and super-
vision. The ethnographer listens and tries to understand, rather than to judge;
the ethnographer returns to the subject to try to corroborate the ethnographic
insights (an insight being not unlike an interpretation); and the ethnographer
works with the subject to develop a sense of how the subject sees and experiences
their world.
 Preface xi

Moreover, both psychotherapists and ethnographers understand more deeply

than most people that the accounts they give of what they observe – their insights
and interpretations – are partial and co-constructed. Insights and interpretations
are, to some extent at least, narrative truths rather than historical truths. People
are complicated, and any attempt to capture a person’s motivations and experi-
ences is f lawed.
The difference between psychotherapy and ethnography, of course, is that the
therapist is trying to change the other person through participant-observation, and
the anthropologist is not. The therapist is using participant-observation to help the
person with whom they work to understand themselves so that they can change.
Anthropologists often imagine themselves as trying to alter the world they study
as little as possible and to describe it as carefully as they can in order to make some
point in an intellectual argument their research subjects will never read.
This is why the two fields can learn from each other.
These days, anthropologists have a harder and harder time seeing the point of
their own arguments. We are at an unusually morose moment in our discipline’s
history. No grand debates captivate the field. Our theoretical lodestones have not
changed much since the 1970s, when we fell in love with Foucault and power
became an explanatory axis. Our research topics have grown far more diverse
that they were for our intellectual ancestors, but the world itself has become less
varied – more accessible, more interconnected, more travelled. No one will ever
be able to write a book like Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande and
startle an Oxford senior common room in the same way again.
What anthropology can learn from psychotherapy is that their work matters
when it has the potential to change the lives of those among whom we work. If
we thought of the audience for our work as including those among whom we
work, our field would change. Our work would become more readable, for a
start. We would also be forced to ask whether what we learned in our research
was worth the investment of our participant’s time: whether what we learned
about the symptoms of depression in some particular place, for example, was
relevant to thinking about the treatment of depression, so that clinicians treat-
ing depression there might learn something useful. This does not mean that
anthropology should become applied. It is more that when one does research on
questions to which one’s research subjects want to know the answers, the work
seems more meaningful and more alive. Students who asked questions like these
would find a greater sense of purpose.
What psychotherapists can learn from anthropology is that culture is not
something you possess but something you do (to use James Davies’ formula-
tion here). The great pressure on the practice of psychotherapy within a socially
diverse world is to show that people from different backgrounds can benefit from
this care. Thus, a new emphasis on “cultural competence” has emerged. But it
is all too easy to allow an attention to cultural difference to become a parade
of stereotypes. Anthropologists know that culture is what participant observa-
tion discovers through the interaction between people. The central principle in
xii Preface

cultural competence should be respect in the interaction with other people – not
knowledge about who one thinks those other people are.
The greatest stakes, however, are that anthropologists and psychotherapists
can build together an awareness-centered model of the mind. This is what I see
at the heart of Keir Martin’s project here. There are many scientists working to
develop accounts of mental process from what Heinz Kohut, and later Clifford
Geertz, called an experience-distant perspective – and we need those accounts.
But we also need accounts that pay close attention to the experience of thinking,
believing, desiring, imagining, feeling, and so forth. Anthropologists and psy-
chotherapists have more experience-near knowledge about the way people expe-
rience mental states than scholars and practitioners in any other fields. Working
across fields, they will be able to ask whether the subtle accounts of human expe-
rience people learn from depth exploration in a clinical context make sense in a
non-clinical context in another culture, and how the knowledge of those non-
clinical domains should challenge the assumptions within the consulting room.
From these exchanges – and particularly from those who are both ethnographi-
cally and clinically sophisticated – will come a more complete understanding of
the mind that we have had, and of the self, the person, the imagination, and of
social life in general.
Tanja Luhrmann
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book came out of a series of workshops hosted and supported by the Depart-
ment of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. I would like to thank the
Department for their support in making this book possible. I would also like to
thank all of the participants in the workshops and the writing project for their
input. In particular, I would like to mention Kate Schechter of Chicago Uni-
versity. Although Kate was unable to contribute a written piece to this volume,
her contribution to the discussions was an important part of the process that led
to this book. In addition, I would like to thank a series of interlocuters from
the Manchester Psychotherapy community for discussions, in particular Karen
Burke, Fatima Adam, Sue Hawkins, Andrew Hodges, Tayeba Jaleel, Angela
Keane and Tom Keeley. I would also like to thank my co-collaborators in estab-
lishing the European Network for Psychological Anthropology, James Davies
and Thomas Stodulka. And, finally, I would like to thank the staff at Karnac
Books and Routledge for their help and encouragement in this process.
INTRODUCTION
Keir Martin

Psychotherapy stands accused. The charge sheet consists of old familiar indict-
ments made from new and surprising quarters. At the top of the list is the claim
that psychotherapy embodies an individualism that it is both unable and unwill-
ing to fully explore. The cure is classically psychodynamic. It consists of bringing
to awareness and working through the unconscious origin of this now taken for
granted way of being in the world. Hence, the foundation of psychotherapy’s
character is both the hidden cause and the potentially to-be-revealed cure of its
currently diagnosed pathology. Psychotherapy’s ‘individualism’ is caused by its
origins in a particular cultural setting. For those who speak in general terms, this
is ‘the West’. For those with more of an interest in the particular case of Freudian
psychoanalysis, it is the narrower context of 1890s middle-class Vienna. Either
way, because of its cultural origin, psychotherapy has allegedly focused on the
internal lives of bounded individuals, and because of this singular focus, it is said
to have remained blind to the importance of culture. Like a client trapped by
maladaptive ways of seeing, feeling and being that originate from her upbringing
in a dysfunctional family that her current dysfunction leaves her unable to per-
ceive and break, so psychotherapy itself is characterised as being trapped within a
similar tragic unconscious feedback loop with regard to the culture that brought
it into being. The increasingly widely accepted remedy is to bring this dysfunc-
tional model to awareness so that its negative effects and absences can be recog-
nised and new, healthier ways of seeing put in its place. Psychotherapy is enjoined
to bring culture to its own therapeutic awareness. In this telling of the story,
then, the cure for psychotherapy’s culturally determined malaise is revealed to
be the revelation of culture.
These are in some regards not new complaints. They are almost as old as
psychoanalysis and modern psychotherapy, and they will be familiar to anyone
with an interest in the more critical edges of psychotherapeutic theory or social
2 Keir Martin

scientific discussions of the limitations of Western psychotherapy. The critique

of psychotherapy’s alleged focus on the bounded individual and its concomitant
ignorance of culture is perhaps most associated with the discipline of anthropol-
ogy, where it has a long history dating back at least as far as Malinowski’s debates
with Ernest Jones in the 1920s regarding the universality of the Oedipus com-
plex. These discussions set the template for a recurring discussion inside anthro-
pology that pitted universalist explanations of human existence (such as those
allegedly given by classical psychoanalysis) against cultural relativist critiques
of the alleged ethnocentric assumptions of such models. In recent years, such
criticisms have gained a new audience and importance, however. No longer the
preserve of critics on or outside the borders of the therapeutic community, they
have been incorporated into the heart of psychotherapeutic theory, training and
practice. Although some may continue to decry mention of cultural difference
as heresy or a defence mechanism against the universal truths discovered by their
particular school of thought, ‘culture’ is now an essential component of many
therapy training courses, taking up as much, or more, space and time than con-
cepts such as ‘transference’ or ‘empathy’. And even if in some quarters the nature
of its introduction is resisted, isn’t such resistance to the revelation of blind spots
in the patient’s way of seeing herself an inevitable part of the process of change?
Great effort goes into overcoming this resistance to ‘culture’, just as previous
generations of analysts might have put great effort into identifying clients’ refer-
ences to their ‘culture’ as a defence mechanism designed to resist the revelation
of a hidden truth. ‘Cultural’ competence has gone from being an invisible or
unmentioned factor to a core competence that must be seen to be acknowledged
and performed.
This recent and sudden incorporation of ‘culture’ into the heart of contem-
porary psychotherapy coincides with other changes. Most notable are moves
towards the manualisation and standardisation of psychotherapy training and
provision. With this has come a greater emphasis on the demonstration of acquir-
ing particular skills and competences to deal with particular issues, as opposed
to a perspective that viewed the acquisition of such skills more as a means to the
development of a particular holistic, therapeutically beneficial subjectivity or
way of being. That the rise to prominence of a particular model of demonstrat-
ing ‘cultural competence’ should coincide with these other changes of emphasis
and governance may not be entirely coincidental, as many of the contributors to
this volume argue.

THE CRITIQUE OF THERAPEUTIC ‘INDIVIDUALISM’

Let us start with the ‘individualism’ of which therapy is now accused and the
problems that it is said to carry with it. ‘Individualism’, we are told is ‘Western’.
Consequently, any explicit claim or implicit underlying assumption that such
‘individualism’ is the starting point for understanding persons or the desired
end point of therapeutic intervention is said to be potentially illustrative of an
 Introduction 3

arrogant and ethnocentric attitude. In recent years, this critique has gone from
being predominantly an academic or political critique made from the outside to
one that is increasingly internally enforced as a new orthodoxy to which prac-
titioners must themselves display affiliation. This process has taken on a new
urgency within the discipline as psychotherapy spreads globally and as its client
base in its Western heartlands becomes more ‘culturally’ diverse. Performing this
new acquired understanding can then be added to the set of core competencies
that ‘best practice’ or the ‘professionalization’ of psychotherapy requires in an
increasingly standardised, regulated and institutionally managed age.
A defining characteristic of the ‘individualism’, allegedly so central to the
kind of psychotherapy critiqued in these depictions, is an obsessive focus on the
interior of the person at the expense of the external social relations and structures
within which they are embedded. Far from ‘individualism’ being a ‘natural’
state at constant risk of being crushed by an over-regulating society, as in some
libertarian perspectives, ‘individualism’ from this perspective can itself become
conceptualised as an ideology or way of being imposed by a competitive society
upon persons who may otherwise have gravitated towards more communal or
consensual ways of being. It is worth noting that there has long been a strand of
criticism of psychotherapy that has contrasted its alleged obsessive individualism
with its reciprocal ignorance of external factors, particularly from those on the
political left, both within and outside the discipline that has tried to question
the extent to which psychotherapy necessarily adapts its clients to the needs of a
competitive society or might instead be part of a radical critique of that society’s
foundational premises.
Today perspectives that are critical of therapeutic ‘individualism’ are more
likely to conceptualise such external networks of relations and ideas as ‘cul-
ture’ than ‘society’, and along with that shift has come other shifts of emphasis.
The rise of ‘culture’ as the concept to be contrasted to the ‘individual’ in such
discussions coincides with a downgrading of the importance of ‘economic’ fac-
tors that itself goes alongside a growing tendency to frame the problem to be
addressed as one of cultural misrecognition of non-individualist ways of being.
This in turn coincides with a situation where it is broadly agreed that work-
ing and wage-labour are good practices in which people should be encouraged
to participate. Work is often framed as a social good, and therapy’s funding
by governments and business interests has often depended upon demonstrat-
ing that it can help to achieve that social good. Recent expansions of busi-
ness and government support for therapy, such as were seen in the UK in the
early 2000s, were explicitly linked to this perceived social good, and expanded
therapy services, such as IAPT, were set the explicit task of getting more peo-
ple back to work. This coincides with a situation where statistical evidence is
marshalled to support the idea that getting back to work is good for depressed
or emotionally unwell patients and predicts a better chance of ‘recovery’. The
possibility that the entire structure of work in contemporary society might
create illness and dissatisfaction both for those who are able to secure and
4 Keir Martin

hold employment and those who are not was largely removed from the agenda.
This particular wider social criticism, which one can easily imagine being put
forward by previous psychotherapeutic radicals such as Fromm, Laing or David
Cooper, no longer fits a zeitgeist in which the acceptance of the healthiness of
work is a precondition for funding and support.

INDIVIDUALISM AND THE INNER PERSON

The Western individualism allegedly at the heart of psychotherapy stands accused
of an excessive focus on the interior of the individual. It is a focus that is often
described as misunderstanding the nature of human beings in general as being
the outcome of some innate inner essence contained within the individual as a
bounded entity. If the problem is determined to be ‘individualist’ or ‘psycho-
logical’ therapy’s lack of (attention to) the wider ‘culture’, then the addition of
‘culture’ to therapy almost inexorably presents itself as the obvious solution to
therapy’s shortcomings. The chapters in this collection critically engage with
some of the issues raised by the move towards this framing from a variety of
angles. All of the contributors to this volume are professional anthropologists
or ethnographers, and all but two are fully qualified psychoanalysts or psycho-
therapists, with the remaining two both having made research on psychotherapy
and psychoanalysis a central aspect of their anthropological work. Anthropology
and psychotherapy have had an at times long and fruitful relationship, but it is
a relationship that has often been dogged by mutual antagonism and misunder-
standing. The role of ‘individualism’ in classical psychotherapy is possibly one
of those misunderstandings, and it is arguably a misunderstanding that is now
being imported back wholesale into contemporary psychotherapy from external
sources such as anthropology. The concept of ‘culture’ that is becoming increas-
ingly important within psychotherapy is one that was largely developed within
anthropology, although that discipline has now largely discarded the particu-
lar conceptualisation of ‘culture’ that contemporary psychotherapy increasingly
makes use of. These are issues that those with a foot in both camps are in a
unique position to explore, and through a variety of contemporary and historical
analyses they aim to shed light on some historical and current expressions of this
ongoing relationship.
In the remainder of this introduction, I explore some of what anthropology
and psychotherapy may illuminate in each other today. In particular, I explore
some of the background to the current suspicion of ‘individualism’ and the
attempt to correct its shortcomings with the addition of ‘culture’. This is an issue
with a long pedigree. If anything, it is the issue that has defined the long and
sometimes problematic relationship between anthropology and psychotherapy.
Rather than revisit a history that has been told elsewhere, one of the aims of this
collection is to explore the terms of the debate as it is currently being conducted
in psychotherapy in the midst of its ‘cultural’ turn. Anthropological theory has
devoted much effort in the past few decades to encouraging a greater attention to
 Introduction 5

the shifting meaning of words and concepts (including ‘culture’) and how these
words and concepts shape those contexts as much as they describe them. Rather
than assuming that ‘culture’ or ‘individualism’ are concepts which simply refer to
clearly defined aspects of human existence, the focus is increasingly on the work
that these concepts do to create a separation between aspects of existence and
thereby reshape that existence. The implication of this as a starting point might
be to carry a degree of scepticism towards the assumption that psychotherapy
simply expresses something called ‘Western individualism’, and to instead begin
our discussions by considering what is meant by ‘individualism’ in any particular
context, such as the therapy room or therapy training classroom, and to try to
explore what the speaker wishes to achieve by deploying and framing the con-
cept in that particular way.

BEYOND THE ‘BOUNDED’ INDIVIDUAL

The ‘individualism’ that many contemporary critiques of psychotherapy seek
to deconstruct is one that is said to construct individual persons as if they were
bounded autonomous entities (see Martin this volume). In this conception, indi-
viduals may enter into relations with others, but the nature of those relations is
fundamentally determined by an innate essence contained within the bounds of
this individual human entity. The implication of this is that the individual self
becomes both the starting point of theory and the end point of practical inter-
ventions designed to improve the human condition, rather than the networks of
social relations within which persons are entangled and formed (see also Siddique
this volume).
Different versions of this conception are indeed common in the history of
Western thought, as contemporary critics of individual ‘psychological’ therapy
such as John McLeod observe. It can be identified as the basis of many of the
foundational texts of Western political theory, such as Hobbes and Locke, who
despite their manifold differences arguably have variants of this conception of
human being at the heart of their intellectual projects (e.g. Macpherson 1962).
Likewise, mainstream neoclassical economic theory can be described as being
largely built upon this framework, while Freud is often read, by supporters and
opponents alike, as also standing in this tradition. His theory of innate drives
that shape social relations can all too easily be read as a sexualised version of the
aggressive urges or economic propensities that Hobbes and Locke respectively
saw as providing the need for a society or state that regulates those destructive
tendencies.
While this conception of human being has been massively inf luential in ‘the
West’ over the past five centuries, so too have been other formations that have
often explicitly challenged this foundation. Early twentieth-century anthropol-
ogy advanced one such challenge, with its attempt to demonstrate the particular
‘Western’ nature of this conception of human being through a contrast with
less ‘individualistic’ conceptions that were allegedly more prominent among
6 Keir Martin

non-Western peoples. From the second half of the twentieth century, this eth-
nographic work was increasingly taken up by sociologists and anthropologists
working in more ‘Western’ environments. This work has frequently demon-
strated the ways in which ‘Western’ persons often have a far more ambivalent
relationship to ‘individualism’ and a far more ‘relational’ conception of their own
nature than a simple ‘West as individualism’ paradigm might allow for. There
is a long history in Western social thought of visions that challenge or nuance
bounded individualism, of which the classical anthropological ‘cultural relativ-
ist’ critique that is now being introjected wholesale into psychotherapy is merely
one example.
This point is important to make, as on occasion the nature of what is meant
by ‘individualism’ can be taken for granted along with its association with the
‘West’. One can all too easily end up assuming that there is simple global separa-
tion between the ‘West’ as a culture, where a particular kind of individualism
rules supreme, and the ‘rest’, where it does not. In fact, the Western world is full
of debate and discussion about ‘individualism’ and an often-pained exploration
of the ambiguities arising from it. How many politicians have praised individual
initiative as the basis of an entrepreneurial society one day, for example, and then
denounced rising ‘individualism’ as a threat to social order the next? Rather
than being portrayed as a world-view that expresses a fixed underlying Western
individualism, psychotherapy might instead be seen as one of the key locations
in twentieth-century thought for an exploration of the ambiguities of individu-
alism. Instead of simply seeing psychotherapy as in need of socio-cultural input
from anthropology, a more nuanced understanding of psychotherapy’s history
might lead us to see the ways in which psychotherapy has long been dealing with
many of the self-same issues concerning the relational construction of persons
with which contemporary anthropology finds itself battling, as it attempts to
move beyond older perspectives premised on diagnosing the nature of the rela-
tionship between the ‘individual’ and her ‘society’ or ‘culture’.
In their different ways, most psychotherapeutic theories have explicitly or
implicitly destabilised the very nature of the distinction between the inside and
the outside of the person that is the assumed starting point for contemporary crit-
ics, such as McLeod’s vision both of the drawbacks of (internally focused) ‘psy-
chological’ therapy and for the (externally focused) ‘cultural’ therapy that will
correct its shortcomings. McLeod describes a series of foci for traditional psy-
chological therapies, as if they simply demonstrate a focus on the interior of the
bounded individual that unites all the different therapeutic schools. This even
includes modalities, such as Object Relations, that explicitly focus on relations
as the foundation of the development of the person. Object Relations’ focus on
the interplay of social relations across the boundary of the self might lead one to
conclude that its vision of the person is in many regards diametrically opposed to
that of a bounded entity whose existence precedes relations. Indeed, its focus on
the interiorisation of relations suggests that the very core of the person is relational
and that it is the process of creating a distinction between relations that are internalised
 Introduction 7

and those that are left external that makes a person. Far from a distinction between an
outside world of culture and relations and an inner world of essence being the
inevitable starting point in which we have to pick one side or another, Kleinian
therapy and its inheritors in the British Independent School might suggest a
starting point in which relations themselves are primary, both inside and outside.
This does not mean that the distinction between inside and outside might not
be important, but it is a distinction that cannot be assumed and has rather to
be forged in practice. One potential course would be to further theoretically
explore the ways in which Object Relations destabilises the very idea of a fixed
boundary between inside and outside. Instead, the contemporary ‘cultural’ cri-
tique takes Object Relations’ focus on the interiorisation of particular relations
(a process that actually creates the very nature of an ‘interior’) as evidence that
Object Relations can safely be packaged alongside all the other ‘Western’ thera-
pies as having a focus on bounded autonomous individual subjects. So, McLeod
(2002:137) informs us that new ‘cultural’ forms of therapy focus on therapy as a,
‘discursive arena’.

The idea of therapy as a discursive arena is, of course, quite contrary to

most existing understandings of therapy, which postulate some kind of
inner mechanism or structure within the individual (self, object relations,
cognitive or emotional schema) that is deficient and requires restoration.

We could note that the idea of therapy as a ‘discursive arena’ may not seem so
alien to many ‘existing understandings of therapy’ as McLeod seems to sug-
gest, going as far back as Freud and Breur’s popularisation of Anna O’s term,
‘the talking cure’, in the late nineteenth century. More important, in McLeod’s
depiction, Object Relations (as conceived by Kleinians or British Independents
or (presumably) contemporary US relational psychoanalysts) are simply cast as
internal, while ‘discursive arena[s]’ are simply cast as external. But can such phe-
nomena be divided and packaged up in this manner? After all, ‘internal dialogue’
is one of the most fundamental processes of human existence and ref lection. Like
(object) relations, language is a fundamentally social phenomenon. Language is
an intersubjective social phenomenon that exists both within and without the
individual person simultaneously in a manner that often makes her boundaries
appear anything but clear and bounded. In McLeod’s characterisation of Object
Relations, he takes two phenomena – (object) relations and language – that are
both intrinsically social and show the intrinsically social nature of even the core
of the person, and show how they exist both within and without the person. He
then takes one (Object Relations, whose very necessity for ‘internalisation’ sug-
gests a foundational position beyond inside/outside) and places it on the inside,
and another (language) and places it on the outside, in order to preserve a distinc-
tion between psychological and cultural therapies in which the former can all be
jointly condemned for their ‘individualism’. Here, he reproduces a debate that has
a long provenance in anthropological theory over the manner and extent to which
8 Keir Martin

it is always possible to sharply distinguish between inner and outer states of being.
This distinction was fundamental to much traditional anthropological analysis,
and it is this focus on the ‘external’ factors of society or culture as the proper focus
for anthropological endeavour that explains much of the disdain for ‘psychologis-
ing’ that has often characterised the discipline, as Davies (this volume) observes.
Hence, to take one example, the inf luential post-war British anthropologist, Sir
Edmund Leach (1958:166), drew a sharp distinction in the following terms:

Public ritual behavior asserts something about the social status of the actor;
private ritual behavior asserts something about the psychological state of the
actor.

Much of the contemporary cultural critique of ‘psychological’ therapy seems to

accept this distinction and, like Leach and many of his contemporaries, seeks to
shift the focus of attention from the latter to the former. But it is worth pointing
out that there have always been voices within anthropology that have sounded
cautionary notes when it comes to accepting the common sense obviousness of
such distinctions. In response to Leach, the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath
Obeysekere (2014[1981]:14) pointed out the problem that

for Leach all public symbolic communication is devoid of emotional meaning

or psychological content. This position introduces a radical hiatus between
public and private symbols, as it does between culture and emotion.

This radical hiatus or split between the public and the private or the cultural and
the individually emotional may be useful from certain analytic perspectives, but
a moment’s ref lection will tell us that it is not always a ready-made distinction
to be clearly found in our lives or the lives or our informants, clients or patients.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Obeysekere was more attentive to the potential
pitfalls of simply accepting this distinction as an empirical reality than many of
his contemporaries in anthropology, on the one hand, and that he is still best
known as an anthropological theorist of psychoanalysis, on the other. His cau-
tion that such distinctions are themselves matters of perspective remains valuable
at a time when the potential danger is that psychotherapy might correct a one-
sided emphasis on a bounded interior with a shift to an equally bounded exterior,
leaving aside the vital question of how and why that boundary comes into being
from different perspectives (see also Seeley in this volume).

Dependence and interdependence

It may be argued that ultimately even the most ‘relational’ forms of psychother-
apy, such as British Object Relations, ultimately focus on the construction of a
kind of bounded individualism as the outcome of successful emotional develop-
ment or psychotherapy. Hence, even for Fairbairn (2001[1941]:42),
 Introduction 9

mature dependence involves a relationship between two independent indi-

viduals, who are completely differentiated from one another as mutual
objects . . . the more mature a relationship is, the less it is characterized by
primary identification; for what such identification essentially represents
is failure to differentiate the object. It is when identification persists at
the expense of differentiation that a markedly compulsive element enters
into the individual’s attitude towards his objects. . . . The abandonment
of infantile dependence involves an abandonment of relationships based
upon primary identification in favour of relationships with differentiated
objects.

Emotional maturity would then seem to involve a paradoxical form of ‘depen-

dence . . . between two independent individuals’. It is a situation to be dis-
tinguished from immature dependence on the basis that it has failed to move
beyond the stage of ‘primary identification’, in which the person has yet to ‘dif-
ferentiate’ her own self from the objects to which she is attached. Hence, to an
extent one can agree with McLeod, that in this conception healthy function-
ing does appear to rely upon the maintenance of a boundary between inside
and outside and a focus on the internal relations, which are to be distinguished
from those that are best experienced as external, even for as relational a figure
as Fairbairn. But the construction of that boundary is itself an achievement that
grows out of interpersonal relations, between infant and caregivers or client and
therapist, to provide just two obvious examples. And this is the case for even the
most ‘intrapsychic’ therapeutic figures such as Freud, for whom the resolution
of relational traumas (such as the Oedipus Complex) was the basis upon which
persons were ideally formed, and for whom the self was inherently made up of
aspects of other persons (such as the super-ego as the manifestation of parental
attitudes within the pre-differentiated core of the developing infant’s person).
Even the Freudian self, allegedly the outcome of purely internally contained
drives and essences, only develops in a healthy or pathological direction by virtue
of the particular relations that it takes into and expels from itself in the course of
its development. Psychotherapy did not simply adopt a bounded individualism
but was also characterised by a (sometimes semi-aware) recognition of the rela-
tional dependencies upon which that individualism relied (whether it welcomed
that individuality or viewed it with some suspicion). This is a tendency that has
been made explicit at a number of occasions in psychotherapy’s history. The so-
called Cultural School in New York in the mid-twentieth century, whose mem-
bers included Horney, Fromm and Sullivan, provides perhaps the most striking
example of the long history of engagement with these issues and concepts within
the discipline. Erikson famously had a lifelong engagement with these themes,
working alongside anthropologists and directly observing the patterns of child-
hood interaction in Native American communities in order to build up models
that stressed the role of culturally variable relational entanglements in personal
development. To this list, dozens more names could easily be added, such as
10 Keir Martin

Laing’s controversial analysis of schizophrenia as a response to social relational

problems. The key concept in this analysis was the ‘double-bind’, itself taken
originally from research conducted by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson on
the Naven ritual of New Guinea (see also Krause this volume).
Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about psychotherapy as an example of
twentieth century Western thought is the extent to which it strove towards a rec-
ognition of the ways in which a full understanding of human being necessitated
a constant shifting between perspectives. It focused on the otherwise inaccessible
and hidden corners of the psyche, while simultaneously drawing attention to the
immense amount of relational work that had to go into differentiating the inside
from the outside of the person. Hence the seemingly paradoxical nature of the
formulations of some of those who struggled with this dynamic most deeply.
The ostensible contradiction of ‘dependence’ between ‘independent individuals’
was well apparent to Fairbairn (ibid.), who also spoke of the manner in which in
‘infantile dependence’,

the object with which the individual is identified[,] becomes equivalent to

an incorporated object, or, to put the matter in a more arresting fashion,
the object in which the individual is incorporated is incorporated in the
individual.

The work of distinguishing inside from outside is never complete, and Fairbairn
seems to suggest that dreams often express not so much repressed sexual urges,
but a part of the person that still desires to dissolve that boundary and return to
an undifferentiated primary identification. Whether this position is best char-
acterised simply as an expression of a ‘bounded individualism’ that continues a
tendency in Western thought characterised by writers such as Hobbes or Des-
cartes is itself ultimately a matter of perspective. As Scharff and Birtles (2001:xi)
note, Fairbairn at points consciously differentiated his approach from the Pla-
tonic mind/body dualism that he saw as being too inf luential in Freud’s writ-
ings, drawing instead on his studies of other figures within Western thought,
such as Hegel and Lotze, who challenge that starting point. Indeed, the ways in
which thinkers such as Fairbairn approached these issues suggests that they were
in many ways approaching a position that stressed the construction of persons out
of relational entanglements; this was in many ways far more nuanced than many
of their contemporaries in anthropology, who were largely working within a tra-
dition that stressed the opposition of ‘individuals’ to ‘society’, as if the existence
and emergence of individuals could be simply assumed.
Of course, it is still possible to critique psychotherapy in general for drawing
its boundaries too tightly around what it considers to be important in the rela-
tional world. Hence, even with its focus on immediate family relations, Object
Relations and other relational approaches in psychotherapy could still be cri-
tiqued for ignoring ‘wider’ social problems leading to mental distress. Again,
however, it is worth noting that this is not an entirely new critique. Many figures
 Introduction 11

in the history of psychotherapy, such as Fromm, made precisely this point many
decades ago. And even if more explicitly relational forms of psychotherapy can
still be subjected to varieties of this criticism, they still show that the root cause
of this problem is not as simple as psychotherapy’s unconscious attachment to
a particular form of bounded individualism associated with a caricature of the
orthodox Freudian analysis. Rather, it illustrates the ongoing nature of problem-
atic process by which we draw the boundaries of the unit of analysis, and limiting
the chain of relational entanglements from which that unit is formed, whether it
be the individual person, the nuclear family, the extended family or ‘wider’ soci-
ety or culture as a whole. These objects of analysis are formed in the interactions
(such as that between parents and children or therapists and clients), as all objects
might be said to be formed as objects of perception through the very process of
differentiating them out of the f lux of experience from which they emerge.

The rise of culture

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest not only in ‘cultural’ therapy but
also ‘relational’ forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis more generally. Here
psychotherapy mirrors a turn in anthropology and social sciences more generally,
in which a long-standing interest in the nature of social relations has been fore-
grounded and intensified in recent years. In both disciplines, a central focus on
social relations as the fundamental building block of persons is a distinguishing
feature of many, or perhaps most, leading practitioners.
Historically, British and American anthropology were divided by the former’s
concentration on ‘society’ and the latter’s focus on ‘culture’ as their abstrac-
tions of choice. Today, both of these models are often critiqued for construct-
ing an image of culture or society as an abstraction that stands separate from
the individual and in some way moulds or socialises her. It is this conception
that often appears to underpin the ‘cultural’ models that have been increasingly
imported into fields such as provision of public services, public policy, manage-
ment consultancy and psychotherapy in recent decades. The irony is that within
the social sciences, critiques of this framing have become increasingly inf luential
at precisely the same time as they have been taken up outside the academic dis-
ciplines that gave birth to them. Authors such as the sociologist Bruno Latour
and the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern have been at the forefront of calling
into question the assumption of such a thing as ‘society’, for example. Similarly,
a variety of authors in anthropology, most notably those associated with the vol-
ume Writing Culture published in 1986 (including a contributor to this volume,
Vincent Crapanzano), led the charge against the idea of ‘culture’ as something
existing objectively outside of the anthropologist’s construction of it in text as
an explanatory device. These critiques have a number of different emphases, but
they share a common concern, that many earlier models of ‘culture’ or ‘society’
were built with the purpose of simplifying and translating messy and ambiguous
or contested perspectives on relations and ideology into fixed, stable patterns or
12 Keir Martin

structures. This process of cultural simplification was carried out predominantly

for Western audiences, first of academics and then of administrators or consul-
tants who needed such a conception of ‘society’ or ‘culture’ as a relatively fixed
stable entity, shared among its members in order to use it for purposes of public
and private management.
In the following discussion of critical engagements with this history, I focus
on the work of Marilyn Strathern as an example of an inf luential anthropologi-
cal thinker from recent years. Although Strathern has written about the dangers
of treating ‘culture’ as a reified abstraction (see Krause this volume), her focus
has been more on the problems inherent in assuming a ‘Western’ conception
of ‘society’ as the universal shared basis of all human existence. Her critique is
among those that most explicitly addresses the issue of relational entanglements
as being at the heart of being human, in a manner that presents a useful point
of comparison with the history of dealing with similar issues in psychotherapy.
Strathern’s critique of the idea of ‘society’, which had been prevalent in
twentieth-century British social anthropology and sociology, is most developed
in her most famous book, The Gender of the Gift. In this book, she argues that
the idea of society as an external force, standing outside of and above individuals
and shaping them in particular ways, is itself a peculiarly Western way of think-
ing about the importance of social relations in people’s lives. One can easily
find examples of work from previous generations of social scientists that seem to
illustrate the kind of perspective that she is holding up for critical interrogation.
To provide one example from many that I could present, we can take inf luential
British social anthropologist Victor Turner’s description of Ndembu initiation
and healing rituals in Africa. Turner (1985[1964]:41) describes them as being
processes in which the power of society ‘is felt to change, the inmost nature of
the neophyte, impressing him, as a seal impresses wax.’
With this conception of an inner core moulded by a socio-cultural power
that appears as an external force, it is no wonder that Turner also provides at
times an example of the long-standing anthropological tradition of drawing a
sharp distinction between ‘social’/‘cultural’ and ‘psychological’ explanations, to
the detriment of the latter, as noted by Davies (this volume). ‘Here again a cultural
explanation seems preferable to a psychological one’, he observes at another point
of the discussion (Turner op cit:50). No wonder also, then, that Turner’s depiction
of Ndembu healing rituals is one of the anthropological texts cited in most detail
by McLeod, who also promulgates such distinctions between cultural and psycho-
logical explanations, similarly to the detriment of the latter. McLeod (2006:51)
describes Turner’s depiction of Ndembu ritual in glowing terms as a therapeutic
process that is ‘highly collectivist’ and involves ‘all members of the village com-
munity’. He compares this favourably with individualised Western therapy where
the patient would in all likelihood meet individually with a psychotherapist, and
might use his leisure time to consume music and visit the outdoors’.
It is worth noting that this romanticisation of such collective activities
might be shared by many members of ‘the’ community but may well not be so
 Introduction 13

enthusiastically experienced by others who are expected or forced to participate.

Indeed, the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the’ community is one that contem-
porary anthropological accounts tend to call into question, preferring to ask how
it is that membership of a community is ascribed and contested rather than tak-
ing it as a given. And the starkness of the contrast between Western individualist
culture (bad) and Ndembu collectivist culture (good) would certainly not be
shared by many contemporary anthropologists, who would be concerned at how
such blunt contrasts might cover up diverse positions and interests within these
‘cultures’ – normally to the detriment of those with the least power – to assert
their vision of desirable cultural values and practices.
Such approaches, based upon the way that ‘society’ as an external force shapes
‘individuals’, can also be critiqued for reinscribing the very assumption of ‘indi-
vidualism’ that they set out to decentre. For although they place a great deal
of determining power on the nature of different socio-cultural structures in
human life, they can often assume that society or culture or civilisation emerge
to deal with the problems inherently contained within each individual (Freud’s
monsters from the Id arguably being a fine example). In so doing, they seem to
assume that there is a fundamental separation between the innate individually
contained core substance of the person and a set of social relations that in some
way stands separate from and even opposed to her.
Strathern’s project is to a very large extent one of creating a new vocabulary
that might enable Western social scientists to move beyond assumptions that she
sees as fundamental to concepts such as ‘culture’ – in particular the conceptual
opposition between ‘individual and society’. The most important terms in Strath-
ern’s lexicon are probably ‘relational’, ‘sociality’, ‘dividual’ and ‘partible’. All of
these terms push anthropological analyses towards less bounded conceptions of
the person in a manner that might bear comparison with the way in which psy-
chotherapy’s subject matter has often pushed practitioners in the same direction.
The most fundamental conception of ‘relational’ personhood simply means that
relations are the primary defining feature of human being; that persons are con-
structed out of relations; and that this should be our starting point rather than
the conception common in ‘Western’ thought (as both Strathern and McLeod
might characterise it) that individuals and their innate internal drives, desires or
capacities are the fundamental starting point. ‘Sociality’ for Strathern refers to
the importance and existence of social entanglements in all aspects of human life,
internal and external; it is contrasted to the idea of a ‘society’, standing separate
and outside of the individual person in a necessary but sometimes antagonistic
relation to her, that she argues is common in Western political thought.
Strathern’s work is particularly closely associated with the concept of the
‘dividual’ person. She contrasts this with the model of the ‘individual’ common
in Western political thought, which she describes in the following terms:

Persons receive the imprint of society or, in turn, may be regarded as

changing and altering the character of those connections and relations. But
14 Keir Martin

as individuals, they are imagined as conceptually distinct from the relations

that bring them together.
(Strathern 1988:12–13)

The tradition that Strathern (‘the imprint of society’) is referring back to includes
such figures as Turner (‘impressing him, as a seal impresses wax’) and earlier fig-
ures in anthropology such as Radcliffe-Brown and his great sociological inf lu-
ence, Durkheim. By contrast, Strathern (op cit:13) argues that the Melanesian
people who are the focus of The Gender of the Gift

are as dividually as they are individually conceived. They contain a gener-

alized sociality within. Indeed, persons are frequently constructed as the
plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them.

Far from lying outside of them as an external object that they both possess and
are shaped by, in the form of society or culture, sociality is the ‘within’ as well as
the ‘outside’ in this dividual conception of the person.
The phrase ‘dividual’, although today largely associated with Strathern, first
appeared in the work of the anthropologist McKim Marriot in his 1976 paper,
‘Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism’. In this paper, a similar descrip-
tion of the dividual as a different conception of the person who transcends com-
mon oppositions between the internal individual and the external social aspects
of life is clearly laid out:

actors are not thought in South Asia to be ‘individual’, that is, indivisible,
bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological
theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are
generally thought by South Asians to be ‘dividual’ or divisible. To exist,
dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material inf luences. They must also
give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances, essences,
residues, or other active inf luences that may then reproduce in others
something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.
(Marriot 1976:111)

This in many respects fits the classic cultural relativist template imported into
psychotherapy – that a particular kind of non-Western set of people (in this case
South Asians, in Strathern’s case Melanesians) have a mode of personhood that
does not stress individualism, as it might commonly be conceived of. But far
from describing these entanglements in terms that imply they take the form of an
external ‘culture’ that stands outside of ‘individuals’ and then shapes them, here
the relations pass in and out of persons in the very process that makes them in the
first place. The key task that the concept of ‘dividual’ then achieves is precisely
to dissolve an assumed foundational separation between the pre-social inside and
social outside of persons. Instead, all internal aspects of persons are ultimately
 Introduction 15

particular configurations of relations between persons, as Marriot summarises

with the claim that, for these dividuals,

what goes on between actors are the same connected processes of mixing
and separation that go on within actors.
(Marriot 1976:109)

While the concept of the ‘dividual’ has gone on to become inf luential in anthro-
pology via the work of Strathern, it has also been taken up by inf luential figures
in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, not least the Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir
Kakar; Kakar has drawn upon the concept to make sense of the different experi-
ence of conducting therapy with Indian clients, who he argues are more likely
to see their own person in these dividual terms, while also being keen to stress
that, as a cultural dichotomy, its importance and absolute status should not be
‘overstated’ ( Kakar 1982:275).
The final idiom of ‘partibility’ of persons is obviously a close cognate of
those already mentioned. It is fundamentally the idea that aspects of persons
(who themselves have been formed out of relations) can be separated out
from those persons in order to help form other persons. Strathern quotes Fred
Damon’s (1980) ethnography of the kula gift exchange ceremonial cycle in
Papua New Guinea to make the point that ‘a person throws away part of him-
self, his “hand”, and this self is only reconstituted as it is used to make other
selves’ (1980:280). This is part of a wider network of reciprocal relations that
Strathern, following Damon, describes as a process for ‘the creation of persons’
(Strathern 1988:193).
For Strathern, the social problem faced by Melanesians is the creation of per-
sons by differentiating persons from the social relations out of which they emerge,
rather than the ‘Western’ problem of bringing inherently atomised individuals
together into a unified entity called ‘society’. One can see how this ‘Melanesian’
conception of how the person is formed bears some comparison with ideas of
how a separate sense of self emerges in many psychotherapeutic conceptions.
The infant has no sense of self at first and experiences an undifferentiated unity
with her environment, most significantly her primary caregivers. Through a
long process of introjecting her relationship with those caregivers, she is able to
finally construct them, and therefore herself, as a separate person. There are clear
differences between these two processes, of course. The former is a very public
process in which whole groupings come together to perform this construction
of persons through the process of acknowledging their origin, in relations from
which they are then differentiated. The latter is often a more private process that
the person may remain largely unaware of unless they consciously ref lect upon
it in a process such as therapy. Therapy can be seen as analogous to ceremonial
ritual, then, not in the sense that it imposes the power of ‘society’ upon ‘indi-
viduals’ (though many people have indeed characterised both processes in this
manner), but instead because they could both be viewed as ways in which the
16 Keir Martin

processes by which persons are formed out of relations are ref lected upon, con-
sciously acknowledged and potentially rearranged.
It is worth reiterating that, once the unfamiliar contexts and terminology are
put aside, there should not be too much in this to unduly surprise or unsettle
many psychoanalysts and therapists. The idea that parts of persons, or relations
with them, become introjected into other persons as the core of the very process
by which persons are formed is fundamental in particular to Object Relations
but can be seen in most other modalities of therapy as well. Likewise, the idea
that a sense of self foundational to the creation of persons is not inherent but has
to be built in and out of these relations is not core to Object Relations alone. It
is this conception that leads many Gestalt practitioners to view Gestalt as a fun-
damentally ‘relational’ theory, for example, despite its common characterisation
as the most highly ‘individualistic’ school of therapy. Generations of anthropolo-
gists have denigrated psychoanalysis and psychotherapy for a singular focus on
the ‘interior’ of bounded individuals, and today inf luential figures within the
discipline itself have adopted this critique. But perhaps psychotherapy’s legacy
might be better characterised as one that has always problematised the distinc-
tion between the inside and outside of the self by showing how the same relations
make up both, and it is only through a careful process of sorting and differen-
tiation that particular boundaries between the inside and the outside of the self
emerge. While anthropology has since the 1980s begun to increasingly adopt
versions of this kind of perspective, psychotherapists – beginning with the likes
of Rank and Klein – have been moving in this direction under the pressure of
their material since the 1920s. Perhaps psychotherapy was always well ahead of
anthropology in this regard; if anthropologists (and increasingly contemporary
theorists with psychotherapy) were to lose their reliance on ‘psychologising’ as
a quick term of abuse, they might be more open to the possibility that some of
the innovations in post-structural and relational anthropology from the 1980s
onwards had been prefigured in psychotherapy for decades.
To say that the individual is not a bounded individual entity foundationally
separate from and prior to the relations into which it enters is not necessarily to
say that there is no self that experiences a difference between its inner essence
and an outside environment at all. It might instead mean that we had to begin
by looking at how that self was constructed from a process of differentiating
between different kinds of social relations and entanglements.
A starting point for analysis might properly be the processes by which such
distinctions are drawn, and in particular those processes that seek to make that
process an object of conscious ref lection (such as ceremonial exchange rituals or
psychotherapy) in order to shape its course and the boundaries of the self that is
formed from it. Such a perspective would then focus on the way that the self is a
shifting, ongoing process of becoming made in relation with others, rather than
assuming it is a fixed entity to be worshipped or destroyed. It would suggest a
focus on what has always been at the basis of psychotherapy as theory and prac-
tice: namely, that the self is painstakingly constructed out of the environment of
 Introduction 17

which it is a part and that the outcome of that process is never be entirely taken
for granted as a stable achievement but rather as an ongoing work in progress.

On becoming a person
The process of becoming a person can then be seen to be one of the inter-
nalisation and externalisation of relations or relationally acquired capacities and
objects. Although rarely explicitly theorised in exactly these terms, the centrality
of this process can be seen in both ethnographic and psychotherapeutic accounts.
The Gender of the Gift, for example, is full of references to such processes. We
find at first many references to the already established thesis that, for Melane-
sians, there is ultimately no distinction between inner and outer essence. But the
creation and display of the moving back and forth between inner and outer states
still at times remains an important part of how human essence moves between
and constitutes persons.

These Melanesian cases delineate the impact which interaction has on the inner
person. . . . Consequently, what is drawn out of the person are the social relation-
ships of which it is composed: it is a microcosm of relations. . . . Awareness
of them implies that they must be attended to. These internal relations must
either be further built upon or must be taken apart and fresh relationships instigated.
The kinds of initiation ritual to which I have been referring stage just the
awareness or acknowledgment of the necessity of so taking further action,
and of the possibility of doing so.
(Strathern 1988:131; emphasis added)

In this description, Melanesian conceptions of the person draw out the realisa-
tion that every aspect of the person is composed of social relationships, right
down to what Westerners might conceive of as the most irreducibly natural and
individually bounded element of the individual person: the human body itself.
The construction of this person from relations is never a completed process but
instead has to be constantly maintained, with relations that are now ‘internal’
having to be built upon or dismantled. The purpose of ritual is to bring this pro-
cess to ‘awareness’ and to acknowledge the necessity of continuing to attend to it
if it is to proceed in a good manner.
Strathern suggests on occasion that an interest in ‘boundaries’ and their main-
tenance is an expression of a particular Western conception of a unitary bounded
self. Yet although everything is relational and the inside and the outside of the
self cannot be distinguished on the basis that one is the location of relations and
the other is the location of pre-relational essence, drawing a distinction between
inside and outside is on occasion unavoidable. Strathern’s own discussion of the
impact of interaction on ‘the inner person’ is just one example. Indeed, what
is clear implicitly from Strathern’s depiction is the way in which relations and
relational objects pass in and out of the person as part of its ongoing constitution.
18 Keir Martin

The ‘impact of interaction on the inner person’ is balanced by the way that ‘the
social relationships of which it is composed’ are ‘drawn out’ of it. Or as Fairbairn
(op cit:43) might have it,

the task of differentiating the object [and hence differentiating the self
from the object] tends to resolve itself into a problem of expelling an incor-
porated object, i.e. to become a problem of expelling contents.

Even if Strathern at times appears to be sceptical of boundaries in general, much

as McLeod is sceptical at times of ‘selves’ in general, the very distinction between
inner and outer and the depiction of relations and relational objects moving
between them suggests that some aspects of the person are impossible to con-
ceive of without some kind of idea of a boundary, both for Strathern and for the
Melanesian persons whose experience she is trying to capture. What both the
public rituals that Strathern describes and the private ritual of relational psy-
chotherapy mark is an attempt to bring to consciousness and shape that process
by which relations are introjected and extrojected from persons who(se boundar-
ies) are formed by that very process.
Despite Strathern’s suspicion of the idea of a boundary, the movement across
an implicit boundary between inside and outside is clearly a central component
of Melanesian idioms of personhood as she understands them, as is also illustrated
in the following passage, in which she claims that Melanesians

locate the sources of their internal efficacy beyond themselves. The sources do not
constitute some other realm or domain but another type of person. . . .
These sources are not to be controlled or overcome but sustained in order
to give perpetual evidence of this very efficacy. . . . They are perpetually
preserved since they are required to elicit, in Wagner’s phrase, the body’s
capacities, to externalize and make known its internal composition. But the
difference between internal (intrasomatic) and external (extrasomatic) rela-
tions has itself to be made known, and this is done through the imagery of
replication, through the collective character of the events by which what is
made known about one body is repeated for many.
(Strathern ibid.)

Here there is an inner self, but the origin of its capacities is to be found out-
side of itself. This does not imply that a distinction between inner and outer is
unreal or unimportant. On the contrary, the distinction is important, but it is not
given or fixed; instead, it constantly has to be ‘made known’. Or, as Winnicot
(2005[1951]:3) might have it, ‘the perpetual human task of keeping inner and
outer reality separate yet interrelated’.
Hence, Strathern’s descriptions of the ways in which relational essence can be
taken inside and moved outside suggests some kind of conception of a boundary,
albeit one that is more f luid and constantly made and re-made in practice than
 Introduction 19

a ‘Western’ one that is either given at birth or ideally fixed at a certain devel-
opmental stage (as with classical Freudian psychoanalysis, for example). If the
relations that make a person ‘are not in a state of stasis’ and ‘awareness of them
implies that they must be attended to’ (Strathern op cit:131) constantly, then it
would make sense that the same would apply to the boundaries across which
relations f low inside and out. Indeed, to attend to the one is inherently to attend
to the other. The self that the Melanesian gift exchange ritual seeks to create is
not fixed at birth or fixed at a particular early stage of relational constitution,
as in Freud’s ideal schema. It may achieve momentary unitary status through
the incorporation of different relational elements in an ideal balance rather than
through their exclusion or repression. Hence Strathern’s critique of earlier theo-
rists like Herdt, who, inspired by Freud, saw Melanesian male initiation rituals
as the attempt to create unitary males through the expulsion of inherited femi-
nine aspects in order to create totally unitary masculine adults. For Strathern,
Melanesian masculinity and femininity are based on the correct balancing of
male and female relational elements inside the person, rather than a Freudian
scheme that begins from innate bisexuality and progressively represses and then
expels the aspects that threaten a unitary adult gender identity. Again, it is worth
noting in this regard that in her move away from idioms such as repression and
expulsion towards concepts such as balance, praised by the anthropological com-
munity as profoundly revolutionary, she is following a path trodden by many
post-Freudians within psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, from Rank onwards.

The contents of the book

In many of its psychodynamic and humanist forms, psychotherapy can be seen
as a practice designed to improve this process of making persons out of relations
by bringing it to awareness and consciously ref lecting upon it. To the extent that
psychotherapy can be considered an ‘individualistic’ practice, this is the kind of
individualism that it has often promoted. Although aspects of Freud’s work do
suggest a conception of ‘society’ as a repressive force that emerges in response to
the innately destructive urges contained in all of us, other therapeutic perspec-
tives have long stressed a more relational individualism that is forged out of an
awareness of the relations that constitute it, rather than one that constructs those
relations as external pressures that appear in the shape of a ‘culture’ or a ‘society’.
The different chapters of this book explore these themes raised by the rela-
tionship of anthropology and psychotherapy from different angles. Many chap-
ters explore the meaning of the incorporation of ‘culture’ into psychotherapy and
ask in particular how this incorporation can be understood in terms of a wider
context of changes occurring inside the discipline. Davies, Krause and Martin,
for example, all discuss the adoption of particular models of ‘culture’ in the
context of changes designed to bring psychotherapy training and practice under
increasingly formalised structures of professional oversight. All three authors
have a concern with the ‘performative’ power of language: that is, the power of
20 Keir Martin

language not merely to describe a situation but also to shape it or bring it into
being. Sociolinguistic discussions of the ‘performative’ power of language most
often use public moments when a change of status is conferred by a particular
use of language as examples. ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’, ‘I arrest
you in the name of the law’ and so on. But any therapist will be familiar with
the process in which ‘naming’ an emotion does not merely describe it but brings
aspects of it to awareness, and in that very process changes the experience of
the emotion that it purports to describe. Psychotherapy as a ‘talking cure’ is an
emblematic example of the way in which these performative aspects of language
can reshape the nature of the phenomena being described by the speaker, includ-
ing the subjectivity and self hood of the speaker herself. This performative aspect
of language, which has increasingly come under the spotlight of anthropologi-
cal investigation in recent years, has been central to psychotherapeutic practice
from its inception. It is also a part of the more public process by which particular
therapeutic sensibilities and orientations are developed and inculcated in train-
ing. A more experienced colleague in the Manchester therapeutic community
who trained in a rather orthodox ‘Person Centred’ establishment in the early
1990s described to me once the ferocity of resistance from trainers if any of the
trainees dared to use the term ‘counter-transference’ to describe aspects of an
interaction with a client, even if it seemed to capture important aspects of the
relationship. Rogers had clearly stated that the term to use was ‘congruence’, and
the insistence on this term rather than its Freudian alternative was clearly felt to
be important to the moulding of a particular ‘Person Centred’ therapeutic sub-
jectivity (as was the shift from ‘patient’ to ‘client’ as well). Today the introduction
of ‘culture’ marks a similarly important shift, and Krause, Davies and Martin use
different material to discuss the ways in which ‘culture’ is used in a performa-
tive manner in contemporary therapy practice, training and governance. It is
clear that there are a thousand potential different meanings to the term ‘culture’:
its relation to particular ethnicised groups, its relation to individual persons,
the extent to which it is seen as being located within or outside of them and so
on. How it is used in any particular moment therefore suggests a conscious or
unconscious deliberate decision to use the term to create a particular object of
intervention in that context. We may be able to find all kinds of justification for
doing so, but it is important to remember that these are lines that we choose to
draw to justify certain courses of action as much as they are neutral descriptions
of distinctions that objectively exist outside of their deployment.
A perspective that focuses on the situated use of the concept of ‘culture’, most
importantly what it does for the person using it in that particular moment, is
most associated in anthropology with the theoretical revolution launched by the
edited collection Writing Culture, published in 1986. One of the key contributors
to that collection was Vincent Crapanzano, and in his chapter in this collection,
he is also concerned with the performative or pragmatic power of language. Cra-
panzano’s paper is focused predominantly upon the re-exploration of a famous
case of analysis: Vincent Binswanger’s analysis of Ellen West in Switzerland in
 Introduction 21

early 1921. Crapanzano’s focus is on the previously mentioned concept of ‘trans-

ference’. What work is done by characterising particular relationships and emo-
tions that they evoke as ‘transference’? How far can the concept usefully be
expanded outside of analytic contexts without losing any explanatory power?
The issue of ‘culture’ raises its head here as well, and Crapanzano joins other
authors in expressing concern about ‘the dangers in stressing cultural difference
in psychotherapy’, or at least one might add, the dangers of stressing particular
models of cultural difference that imply that they are the shared properties of
unified separate groups (see also Martin this volume). It is perhaps hardly surpris-
ing that Crapanzano should be so acutely aware of the dangers of this model, as
someone who was at the forefront of growing trends to subject this conception
of ‘culture’ to critical interrogation in the 1970s and 1980s and to replace it with
a more ‘ref lexive’ understanding of how the concept of ‘culture’ itself shaped the
persons who used it as a device to make sense of their relation to others. This
has occurred at precisely the point that the older model it supplanted seems to
have been taken up outside the discipline in a variety of fields, including psy-
chotherapy. There is little doubt that Crapanzano’s long interest and engagement
with psychoanalysis was a key component in his developing interest in the self-
ref lexive aspects of ethnographic research, forcing the ethnographer to explore
her own subject position in her construction of a particular conception of culture
rather than presuming that the ‘culture’ was an object out there to be scientifi-
cally described. Given the importance of Crapanzano’s work to the development
of this perspective, this can be seen as an example of how anthropology has
developed by virtue of an often-hidden relationship with psychoanalysis and psy-
chotherapy. The irony is that the hidden nature of this psychoanalytic inf luence
on anthropology means that the critique of the earlier models of culture that it
partially inspired is also largely hidden from a trend in contemporary psycho-
therapy that wishes to simply introject those earlier models wholesale.
Other chapters also tackle the issue of ‘culture’ head on in a different manner.
Seeley’s chapter, for example, looks at the role that cultural perspectives might
have in helping to understand different generations of traumatised refugees
arriving in the US. Like Siddique, her approach is at times more sympathetic to
the potential positives of adding ‘culture’ to therapists’ understandings than some
of the previously mentioned texts, pointing out the lacunae in understanding
that can occur when wider aspects of life-worlds outside of therapeutic explora-
tions of childhood trauma are ignored. Possibly this different evaluation comes
in part from working in the USA, as opposed to the UK, where the three thera-
peutic practitioners previously mentioned (Martin, Davies and Krause) operate
and where the compulsory introduction of ‘cultural’ competencies can be seen
as part of a general trend of top-down managerial audit that all three view with
some suspicion. It can also perhaps in part be put down to her greater engage-
ment with orthodox Freudian analytic trends that have traditionally had the
strongest aversion to discussion of psychic distress in terms other than the repeti-
tion of infant traumas within individual adults.
22 Keir Martin

Kitanaka and Siddique’s chapters also raise issues of ‘cultural’ difference.

Like McLeod, Siddique draws upon the anthropological work of Victor Turner,
raising the possibility that the therapy room might be, to use Turner’s term, a
‘liminal space’. But although, like McLeod, she is also keen to stress the impor-
tance of ‘cultural’ factors that have at times been discounted in the therapeutic
encounter, her framing seems more optimistic about the possibilities for that
‘third space’ to transcend fixed distinctions between inner and outer worlds or
between subjects and their cultures. Similarly, like McLeod, Kitanaka discusses
a ‘distrust of the psychological’ and the desire to rummage in the interior of the
person, positing this in the material she discusses as possibly being to an extent
a ref lection of particular tendencies in wider Japanese society. She cites authors
who also critique the idea of the Freudian self as being uniquely Western and
bounded from a Japanese perspective. But as an anthropologist, rather than wish-
ing to take that critique simply at face-value, she seeks to explore the interests
behind its promotion and the inevitable downsides of such depictions of ‘cul-
tural selves’ with regard to their potential erasure of differences to do with class
and gender within particular ‘cultures’. One of her concerns is that caricatured
romanticisations of the Japanese communal self are simply constructed in opposi-
tion to an equally one-sided caricature of the Western. In this regard, she shares
the concern of many anthropologists with models that continue to promote this
kind of generic cross-cultural comparison. Kitanaka’s chapter illustrates the ways
in which different conceptions of the self to be explored in therapy emerge not
as the expression of a shared essential cultural code but through historical pro-
cesses involving factors as complex as changing patterns of healthcare funding
and responses to natural disasters.
What the chapters in this collection all show is that the current adoption by
psychotherapy of a model based on ‘cultural competence’ is only one way in
which the idea of bounded individual selves in therapy might be deconstructed.
Indeed, a more sympathetic reading of the history of psychotherapy might suggest
to us that psychotherapy itself has consistently pulled at the threads of bounded
individualism in manners that might be in some regards more enlightening than
the particular model of culture that some in psychotherapy seek to import from
previous generations of anthropological research. They certainly demonstrate
that the potential for the two disciplines to learn from each other has many more
potential avenues to explore than this one and that the development of a continu-
ing dialogue between them should not be limited to the promotion or rejection
of the current ‘cultural’ agenda.

References
Damon, F. (1980) The Kula and Generalised Exchange: Considering Some Unconsidered
Aspects of the Elementary Structures of Kinship. Man. n.s. 15:267–292.
Fairbairn, R. (1941[2001]) A Revised Psychopathology of the Psychoses and Psychoneu-
roses. In R. Fairbairn (ed.) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. New York: Taylor
and Francis.
 Introduction 23

Kakar, S. (1982) Shamans, Mystics and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Heal-
ing Traditions. New York: Knopf.
Leach, E. (1958) Magical Hair. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland. 88(2):147–164.
Macpherson, C. (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marriot, M. (1976) Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism. In B. Kapferer (ed.)
Transaction and Meaning. Philadelphia: ISHI Publications (ASA Essays in Anthropol-
ogy 1).
McLeod, J. (2002) Lists, Stories and Dreams: Strategic Invitation to Relationship in Psy-
chotherapy Narrative. In W. Patterson (ed.) Strategic Narrative: New Perspectives on the
Power of Personal and Cultural Stories. Lanham, MA: Lexington Books.
McLeod, J. (2006) Counselling and Psychotherapy as Cultural Work. In L. Hoshmand
(ed.) Culture, Psychotherapy and Counseling: Critical and Integrative Perspectives. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications.
Obeysekere, G. (2014[1981]) Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious
Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scharff, D. and Birtles, E. (2001) Introduction. In R. Fairbairn (ed.) Psychoanalytic Studies
of the Personality. New York: Taylor and Francis.
Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society
in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Turner, V. (1985[1962]) Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage.
In A. Lehmann and J. Myers (eds.) Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion: An Anthropological
Study of the Supernatural. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Winnicott, D. (2005[1951]) Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena. In D.
Winnicott. Playing and Reality. Abingdon: Routledge.
1
LESSONS FROM THE
ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELD
Reflecting on where culture and
psychotherapy meet

James Davies

An auto-ethnographic introduction
Like an ethnographer perpetually shifting between two cultures, for the last
twenty years I have spent my professional life moving in and out, through and
between the distinct life-worlds of social anthropology and psychotherapy. By
the time I first became interested in anthropology in my early twenties, I had
already spent two years undergoing psychotherapy myself as well as some years
reading psychotherapy literature in an attempt to further understand myself, oth-
ers and the psychotherapeutic process I was passing through. In particular, I read
representative works in therapeutic traditions such as the analytic/relational
(S. Freud; D. W. Winnicott; H. Kohut); the cultural (K. Horney; E. Fromm; H.
S. Sullivan); the humanistic (C. Rogers; F. Pearls; A. Maslow); and the analytical
psychological ( J. Hillman, S. Jeffers; C. G. Jung). In fact, it was the more anthro-
pologically informed writings of the latter school, and in particular the deep
cultural preoccupations of Carl G. Jung, which helped me gravitate to social
anthropology when choosing my undergraduate degree.
Enrolling at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the late 1990s, I
embarked on what turned out to be an intensely post-structuralist education,
replete with French relativistic and American post-modernist thought. What
arose as a consequence was entirely unexpected: a thorough recalibration of the
broadly individualistic and internalising psychotherapeutic weltanschauung I had
previously adopted. Those formal studies unexpectedly changed my relation-
ship to therapeutic ideas. I no longer regarded them as more or less scrupu-
lous depictions of reality but as cultural artefacts, ideological supports, or social
responses, liberating or enslaving, depending on whom and by whom they were
used – as bearing, in short, a social life of their own. Ideas, for me, now fell from
their glittering sphere of objective revelation to join that earthily panoply of
 Lessons from the anthropological field 25

cultural phenomena ripe for anthropological analysis. My intellectually naivety

had passed, and much psychotherapeutic lore, including my attachment to it, was
demystified as a result.
While many psychotherapeutic ideas had for me lost much of their potency
(at least as totalising explanatory tools), the notion that psychotherapy could be
a useful social practice remained robust – something evidenced by my decision,
after graduating in anthropology, to begin formally training as an adult psycho-
therapist. Once I had put this decision into effect, however, new and unantici-
pated problems soon arose. The highly critical and expository culture that I had
become familiar with as an undergraduate was now supplanted by what felt like
an asinine vocational training that taught us, in almost seminarian fashion, what
to believe and what to do, without requisitioning any inquiry into the social
construction of belief and action. I soon learned that the critical atmosphere of
my anthropological training was less welcome in the therapeutic academy. And
internal tensions ensued as a result.
As such tensions would soon only escalate, I decided to place my psychothera-
peutic training on hold to pursue graduate studies in social and medical anthro-
pology, which, after encountering for the first time many fascinating works in
psychological and psychiatric anthropology, culminated in my writing a disserta-
tion on the nature of psychotherapeutic belief: what enabled psychotherapists, in
the post-metanarrative era, to make an almost modernist commitment to operate
within a set mode or schema of thought – to defer and maintain faith in a mode
or practice that was, after all, under increasing sceptical onslaught? In particular,
I became interested in what role professional socialisation played in def lecting
powerful post-modern headwinds: in preserving an enclave of decided belief
and practice where the newly initiated, upon accreditation, could find a secure
professional, moral and ideological home.
Such questions underpinned my decision to pursue my anthropology doc-
torate on essentially the socialisation of psychotherapeutic professionals, largely
focusing on persons and institutions within the psychodynamic/psychoanalytic
tradition. With my supervisor’s support, I therefore took up my psychotherapeu-
tic training again, but this time as both trainee and ethnographer – becoming
a psychotherapist while at the same time studying this process of becoming
anthropologically. My therapeutic training became part of my field site – my
peers, patients, therapist and trainers, my informants. My oscillations between
the two traditions, previously swaying languidly between distant points, now
pitched and veered ever closer – almost to vibration.
My qualifying as a psychotherapist in the very same month I submitted my
anthropology PhD on psychotherapeutic socialisation symbolically signalled the
comingled world I would come to inhabit: a coterminous life that still lives on.
Within three months of qualifying, I had begun my first university lectureship –
this time largely teaching, it transpired, anthropological insights to psychothera-
peutic trainees. Within twelve months my anthropology doctorate had been
published by a psychotherapy publisher (Davies 2009) and was therefore being
26 James Davies

mostly read by psychotherapists. Within three more years I was now also lectur-
ing in anthropology. Two years later I had taken up a full-time anthropology
readership. For the past seven years I have continued teaching, practicing, super-
vising, researching and writing within both disciplines, in what at times feels like
either a protracted season of fieldwork or a prolonged therapeutic relationship
with anthropology on the couch.
The upshot of this alloyed position has been my distanced-affinity for both
traditions. Like a child pulled by parents at cross-purposes, I inhabit a compro-
mise somewhere in-between. Perhaps a similar sense of liminality is what Vincent
Crapanzano recently referred to when saying he has ‘always felt tangential to the
[anthropological] field . . . always tangential to everything’ (Crapanzano 2015).
Most anthropologists will understand this sentiment, whatever the admixture of
variables from which their marginality is hewn – professional, ethnic, religious,
political. But perhaps fewer will share this feeling with respect to the homeliness
of their own discipline, feeling sometimes comfortable, sometimes not.
The above is more than mere biographical indulgence. It provides the context
out of which my absorption in the relationship and interplay between anthropol-
ogy and psychotherapy has dominated my professional life: one I have expressed
through exploring how anthropology and psychotherapy, broadly defined, are
and can be creatively and mutually informing. Whether using psychotherapeutic
ideas to inform anthropological practice (e.g. in the domain of fieldwork; Davies
and Spencer 2010), using anthropological theory to understand facets of psy-
choanalytic culture (e.g. the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge; Davies
2009) or integrating both perspectives in the study of any social or human phe-
nomenon (e.g. emotional suffering; Davies 2011), I have perpetually struggled
to work at the interface, attempting to chisel spoils from that space in-between.

The argument
In what follows, I shall continue in that effort, this time by bringing anthro-
pological insights to bear on a central theme of this current volume – how the
concept of ‘culture’ as it is currently used guides or misguides contemporary
therapeutic theory, training and practice. My aim in this chapter is to scruti-
nise anthropologically a growing trend within contemporary therapeutic pro-
vision, especially with respect to how culture should be understood, managed
and responded to in the therapeutic setting. My aim is to articulate a series of
propositions, informed by anthropological theory but broadly inconsistent with
today’s increasingly manualised psychotherapeutic trainings, whether such train-
ings operate in universities or through NHS/IAPT initiatives or private training
institutes. My argument is that, apart from in some specialist anthropologically
informed corners, such as the Nafsiyat Intercultural Therapy Centre, manual-
ised psychotherapeutic training, which aims to attain consistency in results and
conations across practitioners, has in this pursuit become increasingly culture-
blind. Not through failing to articulate a concern for culture, or as is usually put,
 Lessons from the anthropological field 27

cultural difference, but through having become wedded to a concept of culture

as something possessed – as something one has, rather than as something one does.
When consulting the relevant literature on culture and psychotherapy, in
recent years there has been a shift toward foregrounding the development of
‘cultural competency’ as an essential matter in training – whether that training
occurs in standard counselling work (Ahmed et al. 2010); IAPT-based CBT
(Bassey and Melluish 2012; Department of Health 2011; NICE 2011); or long-
term therapeutic work (Stanley et al. 2009; Tummala-Narra 2016). This narra-
tive largely frames cultural competency as the capacity to negotiate skilfully the
cultural differences existing between members of the therapeutic encounter –
i.e. developing cultural ‘sensitivity’ to dissimilarities of ‘language’, ‘concept’,
‘behaviour’, ‘perception’ etc., in view of facilitating practitioner understand-
ing and a deeper therapeutic alliance (Collins and Arthur 2010). The dominant
assumption of the cultural-competency narrative, in other words, is that culture
resides in practitioners/client/patients – in persons who have culturally rooted
responses and reactions, which interact, intermix, clash or cohere with those of
others. What matters in any consideration of culture, therefore, is developing
competency in negotiating these interactions, differences and embroilments in
service of understanding, through the deployment of a cultural skill-set absorbed
through one’s specialist training.
While the competency narrative may, in important ways, both highlight and
help people better navigate difficulties encountered in the process of negotiat-
ing difference, I argue that the institutional move towards a focus on develop-
ing ‘cultural competency’ has a f lipside by concealing a powerful ideological
shift away from considering therapy itself as a work of culture, as an embedded
culture practice on its own terms (Furedi 2004; Seeley 1999; Klienman 1988;
Littlewood and Kareem 1992; Smail 2001; Luhrmann 2001). Rather, culture,
from the cultural-competency standpoint, is increasingly configured as a thing
possessed by clients and therapists, as something with which and on which therapy
works. This subtle splicing of culture from practice to persons, from something
one does and enacts as an outcome of therapeutic acculturation, to something one
has in the most colloquial sense, wrongly elevates therapy above that with which
it works, and in consequence denies persons-in-practice certain vital ways of
thinking about the work they do.
What I shall therefore argue is that the vision of culture assumed by the
competency narrative is at variance with an almost axiomatic principle in social
anthropology: that practice is culture, and that by extension therapy is profoundly
context making and thus constitutes, when exercised on trainees and clients/
patients, a highly specific form of acculturation. My aim here is to offer a series
of propositions through which to explore the notion that therapeutic practice is
culture enacted: propositions to be illustrated by way of previously unpublished
ethnographic material gathered from fieldwork largely undertaken in 2007.
The materials pertinent to this current chapter derive from six months’ par-
ticipation in clinical group supervision as a participating psychotherapeutic
28 James Davies

practitioner. These weekly sessions comprised three trainee psychoanalytic psy-

chotherapists, one consultant psychiatrist and one psychoanalytic group facili-
tator, all of whom worked within a context where cultural competency was
expected from practitioners. These sessions thus provide a useful context in
which to analyse cultural-competency strategies at work. With respect to other
observations made in this chapter about the state of training today, these are
derived from my role in the community as practitioner and therapeutic educator;
from anthropological fieldwork carried out in the psychotherapeutic community
between 2003 and 2005; and through many subsequent ethnographic ‘fieldwork
expeditions’, to use Emily Martin’s (2009) phrase, that my professional role in the
therapeutic community habitually affords.

Proposition one
Therapeutic nomenclatures (theoretical, diagnostic) are just as much proscriptive (i.e.
context creating) as they are explanatory and descriptive (i.e. context referring) –
culturally scripting how suffering is understood, managed and thus experienced.

I wish to illustrate the above proposition by way of some general ref lections
on the diagnosis of mental health problems. I choose not to use the term ‘psy-
chiatric diagnosis’ because over the last thirty years, mental health diagnosis
has ceased to be only used by psychiatrists and is increasingly used by a wide
array of psychotherapeutic, counselling and mental health professionals. In the
NHS today, people cannot access mental health/psychological services without
first undergoing a diagnostic test ( Johnstone and Watson 2017), obliging diverse
mental health professionals to work and think within a common medicalised
diagnostic framework. The proliferation of diagnostic thinking across mental
health provision is now ref lected in the number of psychotherapeutic trainings,
of differing modalities, teaching the rudiments of diagnostic thinking and prac-
tice or else legitimising the diagnostic act ( Johnston 2014). While these trainings
may differ in the extent to which they acknowledge the culturally constituted
nature of diagnostic categories (these categories, after all, are not rooted in any
known biomedical markers), and while also they differ in the extent to which
they acknowledge certain adverse effects of diagnosis (i.e. social and self-stigma
it can generate), there are still certain effects of diagnosis passed over in most
clinical and training contexts today. To aid facing these squarely, let us consider
the following ethnographic vignette. Here, I present to my peer-supervisory
team a case study concerning my therapeutic work with a 30-year-old man:

During group supervision I report to the team that Patient X, who had
a diagnosis of bi-polar disorder, suggested to me in our previous ther-
apeutic session that other patients in the psychiatric day centre, sharing
the same bi-polar diagnosis as him, were often playacting. They would
receive the diagnosis, and then begin to exaggerate the relevant symptoms
 Lessons from the anthropological field 29

and behaviours deemed characteristic of the condition. He surmised that

this probably occurred because they would read up on their condition
after being diagnosed and then adapt to what they read. Other patients,
he noticed again and again, were becoming more bi-polar after being so
labelled. He was adamant this kind of subterfuge was going on widely in
the NHS, and was baff led why doctors seemed largely oblivious to it.

When discussing this matter with the supervisory team, the professional response
was to doubt Patient X’s perceptions. Even if some instances of subterfuge did
occur, this behaviour was surely not as widespread as Patient X alleged. Was
Patient X becoming paranoid? Was he somehow envious of other sufferers? Was
he trying to impress himself as the only authentic patient? What, in essence,
were the psychodynamics of his assertion? While such lines of enquiry may be
expected in a supervisory context, it was never considered that Patient X could
in some sense be correct: that the people he observed were indeed becoming
more bipolar after their diagnoses were issued, a phenomenon that has been noted
elsewhere in the ethnographic record (Martin 2009). When we inquire as to
why this possibility was not considered, we espy the work of certain assumptions
about diagnosis at play: in particular, the idea that diagnostic categories essen-
tially describe emotional and behavioural states. While this view is pivotal in diag-
nostic manuals such as ICD and DSM, as well as permeating various diagnostic
tools widely used in training and practice (e.g. PHQ9 and GAD7), it of course
obscures a central component of diagnostic labels: that they are highly proscriptive
cultural symbols, helping shape and direct the forms of suffering they purport to
disinterestedly describe.
To verify the proscriptive effects of diagnostic labels, ample ethnographic and
epidemiological data have revealed how such categories pattern and shape suffer-
ing in both its collective and individual forms. With respect to collective suf-
fering, for example, we know that when new descriptive categories take hold of
a group, they can direct how it experiences and expresses its suffering. This fact
has been richly illustrated by work analysing the stigmatising effects of diagnos-
tic labels (appellations which, by medicalising suffering, radically inf luence how
it is socially perceived, managed and experienced [ Pirutinsky et al. 2010; Cor-
rigan and Watson 2002; Johnston 2014; Goffman 1963]) but also by work reveal-
ing how new disorder categories, having become accepted and reified in that
group’s imagination, alter the course emotional distress can take (Shroter 2013;
Hacking 2002; Harrington 2012; Lakoff 2004; Skultans 2003; Watters 2011).
To illustrate this latter dynamic, consider for a moment the issue of ‘men-
tal disorder’ epidemics and the interesting fact that when a new disorder is
introduced to manuals, such as DSM, incidence rates of that disorder regularly
escalate. For example, after Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
entered DSM-IV in 1994 (replacing the previous ADD), rates tripled by 2004
(Frances 2013); after Dissociative Personality Disorder entered the DSM in 1980,
related cases rose from 200 to 40,000 over twenty years (Maldonado and Spiegel
30 James Davies

2008); after Bipolar II was added in 2000, the ratio of bipolar versus unipolar
depression doubled by 2010 (Frances 2013); and after self-harm entered the DSM
in 1994 (as a symptom of ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’), instances of self-
harm doubled in ten years ( Whitlock et al. 2009; Davies 2013).
Within the mental health community, the most common explanation for the
above escalations is that once a disorder is recognised by the DSM, doctors are
more likely to look for it in their patients, patients are more likely to look for it in
themselves and pharmaceutical companies are more likely to market the condi-
tion and the relevant medications. While of course such factors may help account
for these escalations in part, they can by no means be considered exhaustive. As
the work of Hacking (2002) and Shroter (2013) has shown, once a new disorder
becomes accepted by a given cultural group, it often begins to act as a novel
expressive possibility, providing a new cultural script in terms of which persons
may now recite their distress.
An apposite anthropological term for this scripting of suffering would be
‘mimesis’ – the process by which people unwittingly absorb and perform shared
cultural scripts about how to act in order to achieve certain desired ends. It is
well documented in the anthropological literature that mimesis regularly occurs
in the performance of distress, enabling the communication of suffering through
ways-of-being that are socially recognisable ( Romberg 2009; Harrington 2012;
Skultans 2003; Taussig 1993). In short, human beings seem to be invested with a
developed capacity to mould their bodily and mental experiences to the norms of
their cultures, or, as Anne Harrington has put it, ‘to learn the scripts about what
kinds of things should be happening to them as they fall ill . . . and then they
literally embody them’ ( Harrington 2012). After all, it is crucial we express our
distress in ways that make sense to the people around us; otherwise, we will end
up not just ill but ostracised (ibid.). Thus understood, the notion of mimesis is
heuristically useful in explaining why the ratification of new disorder categories
can increase incidences of the very phenomena they purport to depict.
To illustrate how the above idea can also fruitfully elucidate certain day-to-
day particulars of the clinical setting, I would now like to return to our open-
ing ethnographic vignette and, chiefly, to the accusation Patient X levelled at
certain other patients diagnosed with bipolar – namely, that they were often
playacting. One important question arising here could be whether Patient X
was correct to level this accusation, or whether the team was correct to regard
his accusation as a symptom of his ‘illness’? However, in light of our above
discussion of mimesis, this either/or question now seems to miss the point, as
it entirely overlooks that diagnosis can be proscriptive. In other words, when we
allow for the proscriptive nature of diagnosis, a third interpretative possibil-
ity arises: that the bipolar patients accused of subterfuge were simply enacting
mimesis unawares – unwittingly reciting the bipolar script to which their diag-
nosis had newly introduced them.
As soon as we entertain this new perspective (i.e. that conscious subterfuge
and unconscious mimesis can look remarkably alike), the entire supervisory event
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
leadership in the field compacted the power of the French throne.
The lords who followed the king abroad were less disposed to
dispute his authority at home. When the crusades began, as we
have seen, the sway of the king was limited to the neighborhood of
Paris. During the reign of Louis IX., which witnessed their close,
there were ceded to the crown by their feudal lords the section of
Toulouse between the Rhone, the sea, and the Pyrenees, Chartres,
Blois, Sancerre, Mâcon, Perche, Arles, Forcalquier, Foix, and
Cahors, while at the same time England relinquished its claim to
Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, and northern Saintonge,
thus presenting to the eye almost the present map of France. The
various feudal courts, where they still held separate jurisdiction,
yielded the right of final appeal to the king before the enforcement of
their decisions. Anciently the barons and clergy of France had been
accustomed to meet in general assembly for the support of the
monarchy. For over a century preceding the first crusade such
assemblies had not been held, but when Louis VII. embarked upon
the second crusade the great men of all sections resumed these
loyal conventions. It may therefore be said that modern France was
born amid the throes of the mediæval holy wars. In Germany the
case was different. The incessant quarrel of Pope and emperor, to
which the various crusading projects gave fuel, weakened
imperialism in central and southern Europe. The English throne
doubtless profited by the part taken by the people in the foreign
adventures, which diverted the ambition of the most restless, who
would otherwise have more seriously assailed the sovereign
authority. Spain was still occupied largely by the Moors, and was
thus prevented from sharing to any great extent in the Eastern wars
upon the Infidels; but the engagement of so much of the Moslem
energy in defending its distant lands allowed the Spaniards to slowly
accrete their strength for the final expulsion of the Moors and the
establishment of an undivided Spanish government, two centuries
later, under Ferdinand and Isabella.
Another effect of the crusades was the birth of a distinctly European
sentiment. Men, however diverse in blood and country, could not live
for a generation among common dangers, and be daily actuated by
common purposes, without realizing brotherhood. The Celt, the
Frank, the Italian, and the Teuton saw that they were more alike than
diverse when facing the Asiatic. The followers of barons from either
side the Rhine or the opposite slopes of the Apennines dropped their
peculiar war-cries and adopted the universal “Deus vult!” In time the
Frankish language, the speech of the greater number of the
crusaders, came to be the universal medium of commercial, military,
and diplomatic intercourse. It no longer belonged exclusively to the
subjects of a French king, but was in a measure continental. The title
“Frank” meant anybody from the lands north of the Mediterranean
and west of the Greek provinces. The various nations of Europe
came to feel less jealousy of the dominant race than fear of the
hostile civilization whose armies were massed along the eastern
boundaries of the Continent. Thus the project of Hildebrand to unite
Christendom by means of a crusade was successful in a way he did
not contemplate—the gathering of European peoples into a secular
as well as an ecclesiastical unity.
The papal power, however, was that chiefly affected by the crusades,
both to its advantage and its disadvantage.
Great wealth came to the Papacy from the many estates which
departing crusaders left in either its possession or trusteeship. Thus
Godfrey of Bouillon alienated large parts of his ancestral holdings by
direct gift to the ecclesiastics. Many returning home from Palestine,
broken in health and spirit by their trials, insanely depressed with the
“vanity of life,” ended their days in monasteries, which they endowed
with the remnant of their estates. The Pope, having acquired charge
of and responsibility for the crusading venture, affixed a tax upon the
secular clergy and religious houses. This was at first spent
legitimately in maintaining the enterprises afield, but the immense
revenues were gradually diverted to the general uses of the church.
In the year 1115 the great Countess Matilda deeded all her domain
to the Pope. This addition to the landed wealth of the Papacy
amounted to perhaps one quarter of Italy, and constituted the bulk of
the modern temporal possessions of the holy see. To its own local
property the Papacy had also added acquisitions in all countries,
until it held throughout Europe a large part, if not the greater
proportion, of the land.
The political influence of the Pope was at the same time greatly
extended by the appointment of papal legates. Heretofore the Holy
Father had on occasion delegated representatives, who in his name
should investigate causes and settle disputes at a distance from
Rome. During the crusades this legatine authority was systematized
by the organization of a definite body of men. The Pope was thus
impersonated at every court and in every emergency. A controversy
in London or Jerusalem was settled by one who on the spot spoke
as the Vicegerent of God. If at times the mistakes of legates
imperilled faith in the papal infallibility, as a rule they kept the world in
awe by the terror of the imagined ubiquity of the divine presence.
Another great advantage accruing to Rome from the crusades was in
the establishment of a closer bond between the church and the
individual. Urban II. had absolved all crusaders from accountability to
their secular lords during their absence at the seat of war. In the
enthusiasm of the moment the lords had acquiesced in this as a
temporary arrangement; but they soon lamented their unwisdom in
this concession. The spirit of ecclesiastical obedience was
sedulously cultivated by priest and legate, who pledged temporal
and eternal blessings to those who, whatever their attitude to their
former masters, were now faithful to the Pope. Loyalty to the secular
lord was never restored as of old. In the common thought the pontiff
was the great king and the real commandant of armies. Providence
was not more omnipresent than the care of the Holy Father, and the
judgment-seat of heaven was seemingly transferred to every camp
and every home that was accessible to a Roman agent.
The crusades against the Eastern Infidels inspired audacity and
presumption in the church, which suggested crusades elsewhere.
Whoever was not Catholic was regarded as the Christians’ prey.
Preachers authorized by Rome stirred up the faithful in Saxony and
Denmark to convert by the sword the pagans living along the shores
of the Baltic. An army of one hundred and fifty thousand, wearing
upon their breasts a red cross on the background of a circle,
symbolizing the universality of Christ’s kingdom, devastated pagan
cities and burned idolatrous temples, and after three years secured
from the leaders a promise to make their people Christian—a task
more difficult than it had been before, since the half-savage people
had now learned that Christianity could be as cruel as their own
paganism. Indeed, everything that was not consecrated to Roman
Christianity became the lawful spoil of whoever, wearing the cross
upon his breast, dared to take it. The crusading zeal became thus a
habit of the Christian mind, and led to the horrors of the Inquisition in
later days.
While Rome thus profited in many ways by the crusades, it must also
be noted that the Papacy failed to maintain to the end the prestige it
had acquired in the earlier period of the movement. Pope Innocent
III. (1198-1216) carried the Hildebrandian policy to its highest
realization. The emperor was forced to accept his crown from the
hands of the Holy Father, and also to demit the right he had long
contended for of electing the papal incumbent. The entire
episcopacy in Europe was in the Pope’s control and wrought his will,
even in England. But with Gregory IX. (1227-41) the pile of papal
autocracy began to totter. This Pope, notwithstanding he had twice
excommunicated the emperor, was ultimately obliged to yield to the
secular will. His unchristian hauteur, and the rancor with which his
successor, Innocent IV., pursued the emperor, lost the papal chair
much of the respect of the Catholic world. Soon the various
governments came to resent the absolutism of the throne on the
Tiber. In 1253 Robert Grosseteste protested against the papal
exactions in England, notwithstanding the king was utterly
subservient to Rome, and thus he merited the title, which history has
given him, of one of the great fathers of English liberty. Twenty-six
years later (1279) England enacted the Statute of Mortmain, which
forbade the alienation of property to religious bodies without the
consent of the secular authority.
A similar sentiment was working in France. Probably what is known
as the Pragmatic Sanction of Louis IX. (1268) is not genuine, but the
revolt of that royal saint against the assessments of Rome without
consent of the throne is undoubted, and Louis may be said to have
revived the ancient Gallican liberties, which for a century and a half
had apparently been dead. A bull of Boniface VIII. in 1298 caused
open rupture between France and Rome.
With Boniface the Papacy was utterly humiliated. In 1309, within
eighteen years of the fall of Acre into the hands of the Moslems, the
popes were in exile at Avignon, and the government of the church
became the foot-ball of secular ambition. Clement V. (1305-12)
ascended the papal throne as the creature of Philip the Fair of
France, and was forced to lend himself to that monarch’s cruel and
unjust persecution of the Templars, which order was abolished and
its Grand Master burned at the stake in 1312.
With the diminished prestige of the Papacy came the renaissance of
freer thought throughout the world. The failure of the crusades to
conquer the Moslem, and the futile experiments of war upon
heretical sects like the Waldenses and Albigenses, led to a partial
suppression of the epidemic for forceful conversions, and to a
healthful recollection of our Saviour’s command to Peter, “Put up thy
sword.” In this better condition of the human mind germinated the
modern evangelical methods, the first-fruit of which was to appear in
the Protestant Reformation.
There was something in the life of the crusaders that was favorable
to the growth of a new political sentiment, a popular, not to say a
democratic, impulse, which directly conduced to our modern civil
liberties. In their long and adventurous marches, in the common
camp and fighting together within or beneath the same fortresses,
the lord and his retainers came close to one another. The common
man saw that his muscles were as strong, his mind as astute, his
character as good, as that of his crested superior. Manhood
rediscovered itself on those Eastern plains. The returned knight
could no longer disdain intercourse with the brave men whose
hamlet nestled beneath his castle walls. Their common courage, the
many scenes with which both classes were familiar, the dangers they
had shared, were repeated in story and song about the castle gate.
Aristocratic presumption more than once evoked insurrection among
the brawny fellows, who sang:

“We, too, are men;

As great hearts have we,
And our strength as theirs.”
In their home forays there were to be seen, together with the ensigns
of the feudal lords, the popular banners of the parishes. Indeed, the
new power of the people came to be the reliance of the king in his
contest with rebel lords. Thus everywhere were silently germinated
the forces of the commune and of the Third Estate in France, whose
first assembly was held in 1302. In 1215 England secured for itself
Magna Charta, the central regulation of which was that no freeman
should “be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate but by
the judgment of his peers” and “by laws of the land,” a grant to liberty
which stood in spite of the fact that the Pope declared it to be null
and void. In 1265 there came together the first regular Parliament of
England with the House of Commons a constituent branch.
To the crusades we must attribute much of the increased knowledge
of men and the quickening of inquiry into every department of human
welfare. The crusaders mingled with their enemies in the lull of active
warfare, and especially became familiar with the arts and customs of
the Greeks, their pseudo-allies. The immense treasures of art
secured by the capture of Constantinople, and displayed in every
centre of Western population, inspired æsthetic taste. Such buildings
appeared as the Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Croce, and the Duomo at
Florence (about 1290), Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral
(1220) and Cologne Cathedral (1248). Pisano (died 1270) revived
sculpture; Cimabue (1240-1300) was the first of modern painters; the
new impulse to scientific study produced Roger Bacon (1214-92).
The Troubadours enlarged the romance of the lady’s chamber to that
of the field of exploit, where Europe strove with Asia, and were
followed by the great poets Dante (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-
74). Splendid seats of learning sprang up, like the universities of
Oxford (revived in 1200), Paris (1206), Padua (1222), and
Cambridge (1229). The march of the soldier prompted the voyage of
the peaceful traveller, like Marco Polo, who in 1272 explored the
world as far as eastern China. The crusader learned something of
the science of government from the Moslem, especially in matters
relating to municipalities, for he was compelled to note that Cairo
and Damascus were better governed than Paris and London. The
wars suggested improvements in military equipment and manœuvre;
indeed, the art of handling immense multitudes of men as a single
body was learned by the knights, who, fighting in independent
groups, were often overwhelmed by the massed forces of their
enemies.
Commerce during this time began to spread its white wings upon all
seas. For two hundred years an almost incessant line of vessels
passed to and fro between the ports of the eastern and western
Mediterranean, conveying supplies to the soldiers. As we have seen,
an English fleet transported the army of Richard I. along the Atlantic
coast. Men learned how to lade ships with utmost economy of space
and to take advantage of all winds in sailing them. Roads were
opened which converged to the point of departure from the
surrounding country, where the produce was gathered for shipment.
Agents were scattered throughout Europe to purchase the needed
articles in small quantities, and prepare them in bulk for the voyage.
War thus fostered the commercial habit and skill which were utilized
in times of peace.
Between 1255 and 1262 the Hanseatic League or Trade Guild of the
Baltic maritime cities was formed, and within a century it numbered
in its membership a hundred ports and inland towns. The league
organized merchants for common defence against pirates, the
settlement of disputes by arbitration, and the acquisition of
commercial favors in distant parts of the world. Maritime laws were
codified during the thirteenth century, under the title of “Il Consolato
del Mare,” and were generally enforced along the Mediterranean.
According to a tradition, the code called “The Laws of Oleron” was
compiled by Richard I. during his expedition to Palestine, but with
more probability it may be ascribed to the reign of Louis IX. of
France. Bills of exchange were in vogue as early as 1255.
Commerce brought wealth in place of the sordid poverty which had
marked castle and cottage in the eleventh century. Trade introduced
new articles of food and adornment, at first to gratify the palate and
eye of the rich, but soon to elevate the scale of living everywhere.
Such is the power of habit that luxuries easily acquired quickly
become necessities. People learned no longer to look upon “man’s
life as cheap as beast’s.” Industries sprang up for the home
manufacture of what had originally been brought from abroad.
Invention was stimulated, and the domestic arts took their place in
the foremost line of the new civilization. The Dark Ages had given
way, and at least the gray light of the dawn of a better era illumined
the horizon.
We may note in conclusion the influence of the crusades in staying
the progress of that gigantic power which for two centuries had
contested with Christendom the possession of western Asia. So
rapid had been the rise and spread of the new Mohammedan tide of
Turkish invasion that, but for the barrier presented by the crusaders,
it would have quickly submerged the Balkan peninsula, as it had
already done the plains of Asia Minor; and possibly it would have
poured its desolation into central Europe at a time when Europe was
not prepared to resist, as it did four hundred years later when the
Turks besieged Vienna. The appeal of the Greek emperors for the
help of their Western Christian brethren in the eleventh century was
warranted by the seriousness of the menace. The empire was then
too demoralized to withstand alone the onset of these daring hordes,
who possessed superior powers of physical endurance, great mental
activity quickened by the enterprises they planned for their swords,
and courage as yet undaunted by defeat. What they might have
speedily accomplished but for their enforced halt of two hundred
years on the eastern shores of the Marmora is suggested by what
they did almost immediately after the crusaders withdrew their wall of
swords. The same decade that witnessed the fall of Acre saw the
founding of the present dynasty of Ottoman Turks in Nicomedia
(1299). In 1355 they crossed the sea and planted their first European
stronghold at Gallipoli. In the next century (1452) Mohammed II. was
enthroned as sultan in Constantinople, where his successors have
for four hundred years repelled the arms, and still baffle the
diplomacy, of Europe.
 INDEX.

Abélard, 8, 162, 163.

Accian, 103, 106, 109; death, 111.
Acre, 123;
capture, 148;
by Saladin, 190;
siege of, 215 sq.;
fall, 297;
divisions in, 366;
final fall, 367.
Adela, 148.
Adhemar of Puy, 83, 105, 113;
death, 120.
Afdhal, 135, 137.
Afdhal, son of Saladin, 236.
Aibek, 356, 361.
Albigenses, 298, 322, 375.
Aleppo, 154.
Aletta, 8.
Alexander II., 49.
Alexander III., 15.
Alexander IV., 363.
Alexandria, captured, 180.
Alexius I., 74, 79, 81;
treachery, 85;
vengeance of Godfrey, 86;
character and policy, 88 sq., 244;
at Nicæa, 95;
refuses help, 113, 139;
jealousy, 147.
Alexius III., reply to Innocent III., 254;
protests against Venetian invasion, 271;
cowardice, 276, 277.
Alexius IV., son of Isaac Angelus, 258, 263;
plea, 266;
joins Dandolo, 268;
at Constantinople, 271, 279;
breach with crusaders, 281;
imprisonment and death, 283.
Alexius Ducas, 282.
Alfonso VI., 83.
Algazzali, 60.
Alhazan, 60.
Alice, French princess, 222.
Almoadam Turan Shan, 343, 353-355, 361, 362.
Alp-Arslan, 62.
Amalric, 152, 179, 180;
death, 182.
Amaury I. See Amalric.
Amaury II., 297.
Amaury de Montfort, 333.
Andrew II., Hungary, 303, 305.
Andronicus, 244, 247.
Angelus, Isaac. See Isaac Angelus.
Anjou, Duke of, 355.
Anna Comnena, quoted, 3, 72, 84;
picture of Alexius, 88;
opinion of crossbow, 92.
Anselm, 7.
Anselm, Archbishop of Milan, 139.
Anselme of Ribemont, 94.
Antioch, siege of, 102 sq.;
fall, 108 sq.;
conquered by Bibars, 363.
Aragon, King of, 363.
Archambaud, 172.
Arculf, Bishop, 67.
Arkas, 122.
Arnold de Brescia, 163, 198.
Arnold de Rohes, 128, 135.
Arsuf, 138, 141, 145;
destroyed by Bibars, 363.
Ascalon, 136;
capture, 179, 190.
Assassins, 228, 229.
Assizes of Jerusalem, 142.
Asur, 138, 141, 145.
Athareb, 154.
Atheling, Edgar, 122.
Aude, 20.
Augustine, 66.
Avicenna, 60.
Avignon, 375.
Ayoub, 176, 181.
Aziz, son of Saladin, 236.

Bacon, Francis, 11.

Bacon, Roger, 11, 377.
Baldwin I., 83;
at Tarsus, 99;
quarrel with Tancred, 99;
defection, 100;
submission to Pope, 142;
character, 144;
King of Jerusalem, 144 sq.;
exploits, 144 sq.;
marriage, 148;
death, 149.
Baldwin II., 145, 147;
succeeds to throne of Jerusalem, 150;
character, 150;
captured, 150;
liberated, 152;
died, 152;
helps Moslems, 154;
Templars, 158.
Baldwin III., 152, 153, 173;
against Nourredin, 178, 179;
death, 179.
Baldwin IV., 182 sq.
Baldwin V., 184.
Baldwin I., Constantinople, 21;
assaults Constantinople, 275;
 elected Emperor of Constantinople, 292, 293;
strife with Boniface, 293;
death, 294.
Baldwin II., Constantinople, 322, 332.
Baldwin du Bourg. See Baldwin II.
Balian d’Iselin, 191.
Baliol, John, 363.
Baneas, 358.
Barbarossa, 34, 198;
character, 209;
third crusade, 209 sq., 212;
treatment of Greeks, 212;
death, 213.
Baronius, “Dark Ages,” 6.
Barthelemi, Peter, 114, 118;
Ordeal, 119.
Bavaria, Duke of, 140.
Beauvais, Bishop of, 24.
Becket, Thomas à, 200.
Beirut, fall of, 148.
Benedict III., 69.
Benedict VIII., 57.
Benedict IX., 45.
Ben-Musa, 60.
Berengaria, 222.
Bérenger, 7.
Bernard of Brittany, 67.
Bernard of Clairvaux, 8, 23;
 against Abélard, 162;
second crusade, 164, 166 sq.;
failure and death, 177;
opinion of Henry II., 201.
Bernard of Clugny, hymn, 1.
Berthier of Orleans, hymn, 1.
Bertrade, 152.
Bertrand, 148.
Bethlehem, 124.
Bibars Bendoctar, 345-347, 353, 362, 363, 365.
Bibliography, v.-ix.
Biblus, fall of, 148.
Blachern, palace of, 250.
Blanche of Castile, 330, 336, 357, 358.
Blondel, 234.
Bohemond of Taranto, 83 sq.;
relations to Alexius, 87, 89, 90;
at Antioch, 105, 106;
treats for sovereignty of Antioch, 108;
enters Antioch, 110;
quarrel with Raymond, 120, 121;
attacks Maarah, 121;
submission to Pope, 142, 144, 145;
exploits, 147 sq.;
death, 148;
invades Greek dominions, 247.
Boniface VIII., humiliation of Papacy, 375.
Boniface of Montferrat, 258, 259, 261, 268, 271;
assaults Constantinople, 275;
plots, 282;
emperorship, 292;
 disloyalty, 293;
death, 294.
Bouvines, battle of, 302.
Bozrah, 153.
Brabant, Duke of, 237, 240.
Brunhilde, 24.
Bruno, 60.
Bucolion, palace of, 250.
Byron, quoted, 294.

Cæsarea, captured by Baldwin, 145;

destroyed by Bibars, 363.
Cæsarea on the Orontes, 179.
Cæsarea Philippi, 358.
Cairo, 343.
Calixtus II., 162.
Cambray, Bishop of, 68.
Cambridge, University of, 378.
Capitularies of Charlemagne, 35, 48.
Capuano, Peter, 262.
Carac, fall of, 214.
Carismians, 324 sq.
Castile, King of, 363.
Celibacy, 48.
Cencius, 70.
Charlemagne, 17, 19, 48, 55, 67, 242;
capitularies of, 35, 48.
Charles Martel, 56.
Charles the Bold, 56.
Chegger-Eddour, 343, 353-355, 361, 362.
Chivalry, rules, etc., 26 sq.
Chosroes, 66, 133.
Cid, the, 58, 83.
Cimabue, 377.
Civitat, massacre, 81.
Clarendon, Assizes of, 200.
Clement II., 46.
Clement V., 375.
Clermont, Council of, 74.
Cologne Cathedral, 377.
Coloman, King of Hungary, 79, 80.
Commune, 377.
Comnena, Anna. See Anna Comnena.
Comnenus, Isaac, 244.
Comnenus, John, 152.
Conrad, brother of Boniface, 258.
Conrad, marshal of German empire, 139.
Conrad III., 167, 170;
at Jerusalem, 173;
Damascus, 145;
return, 176.
Conrad IV., 334, 357.
Conrad of Montferrat, 214;
at Acre, 216;
claims to Jerusalem, 218;
 supported by Philip Augustus, 223;
plots, 227;
assassinated, 228.
Constance, daughter of Philip I., 148.
Constantine, 65.
Constantine, minister of finance, 277.
Constantinople, history of, 242 sq.;
great fire, 281;
fall, 284 sq.;
Latin kingdom, 291 sq.;
weakness, 322, 328.
Constantinople, Patriarch of, 287.
Corfu, 268 sq.
Councils, Lateran, 49, 198.
Courçon, Cardinal, 302.
Cross, True, 133.
Crusade, first, 78 sq., 82 sq., 91 sq., 96 sq., 101 sq., 108 sq., 112
sq., 120 sq., 134 sq.;
influence, 156 sq., 160 sq.
Crusade, second, cause, 155, 165, 166 sq.
Crusade, third, 206 sq., 215 sq., 219 sq.
Crusade, fourth, 242 sq., 252, 253 sq., 260 sq., 268 sq., 274 sq., 284
sq., 291 sq.
Crusade, fourth, pseudo, 241.
Crusade, fifth, 301 sq.
Crusade, sixth, 313 sq.
Crusade, seventh, 328 sq.
Crusade, eighth, 361 sq.
Crusade, Children’s, 298 sq.
Crusades, fascination of subject, 1;
causes, 3 sq.;
state of society, 6 sq., 40 sq.;
papal policy, 43 sq.;
results, 368 sq.
See Crusade, First, Second, etc., Chivalry, Feudalism,
Mohammedanism, Peter the Hermit, Pilgrimages, Urban II.
Cyprus, 222, 228.

Dagobert, 142, 144.

Dahir, son of Saladin, 236.
Damascus, Prince of, 152, 153.
Damascus, siege of, 174 sq.;
fall, 296.
Damascus, Sultan of, relations to Louis IX., 356, 358.
Damasus II., 46.
Damietta, siege of, 305, 306, 309;
victory of Louis IX., 338 sq.;
surrender, 353 sq.
Dandolo, Henry, 248, 251, 252, 256, 257;
perfidy, 260 sq.;
attacks Zara, 264;
joined by Alexius, 268;
diplomacy, 268 sq.;
captures Golden Horn, 272;
attack on Constantinople, 275;
further plots, 280, 282;
second attack, 284 sq.;
refuses to contest election to kingdom of Constantinople, 291,
292;
his choice, 292;
death, 294.
“Dark Ages,” according to Baronius, 6.
Dârôm, 229.
Domenicho, Michaeli, 151.
Dominic, 19.
Dorylæum, battle of, 96 sq.
Ducas, Alexius, 282.
Du Guesclin, 10.
Duomo, 377.

Edessa, fall of, 154, 155.

Edgar Atheling, 122.
Edmund, prince of England, 363.
Edward, prince of England, 363, 366.
Egypt, caliph of, 105, 122.
Eleanor, Queen, 167, 171;
rupture with Louis, 173;
divorce, 198;
character, 201;
released by Richard, 202;
appeals to Pope, 233;
ransom of Richard, 234.
Eleemon, John, 157.
Elizabeth of Hungary, 316.
Elvira, daughter of Alfonso VI., 83.
Emico, 80.
England, during crusades, 370;
Magna Charta, 377;
Parliament, 377.
Eremi, 7.
Estate, Third, 377.
Eustace, son of Godfrey, 83.
Eustace Grenier, 151.
Evrard des Barras, 172.
Exerogorgo, siege of, 81.

Fakr Eddin, 340, 345.

Fatimites, 181.
Feudalism, 32 sq.
Finlay, quoted, 62.
Florine, 104.
Foulcher of Chartres, 110;
desertion, 113;
scepticism, 115.
Foulque of Anjou, 152, 158.
Foulques the Black, 20, 69.
France, effect of crusades on, 161;
at close of crusades, 369.
Francis of Assisi, 19, 308, 309.
“Frank,” meaning, 371.
Frankfort, Synod of, 49.
Frederick I. See Barbarossa.
Frederick II., fifth crusade, 302;
sixth crusade, 313 sq.;
life and character, 313 sq.;
acquires Jerusalem, 319;
returns, 321, 323;
relations to Innocent IV., 329, 334;
generosity, 337;