Main description:

Anthropology and psychotherapy have a long and important historical relationship, and in this fascinating collection practitioners with experience in both fields explore how the concept of 'culture' is deployed to guide and frame contemporary therapeutic theory, training and practice.

This task is particularly important as the global spread of psychotherapy, as both an outgrowth of and a potential point of critique to globalised hyper-capitalism, requires us to think differently about how to conceptualise cultural difference in psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy, Anthropology and the Work of Culture provides a valuable resource for psychotherapeutic professionals working in a world in which cultural difference appears in fluid and transient moments. It will also provide essential reading for students and researchers working across the fields of psychotherapy and anthropology.

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Author biographies

Tanja Luhrmann. Preface

Keir Martin. Introduction

James Davies. Lessons from the Anthropological Field: reflecting on where culture and psychotherapy meet

Junko Kitanaka. Overcoming mistrust of the psychological: a history of psychotherapy in Japan

Inga-Britt Krause. Relating with or without Culture

Keir Martin. Therapy and the rise of the multicultural

Karen Seeley. History in the psyche, particles in the self: The case of Z

Salma Siddique. Western Configurations: Ways of Being

Vincent Crapanzano. Sprialling Transference: Ellen West and the Case History

Sudhir Kakar. Afterword