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FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam

Shrinking the Planet: Psychotherapy and the New Global Middle Class.

Alternative title: Psykoterapi og den nye globale middelklassen

Awarded: NOK 13.6 mill.

Our world is changing rapidly as the centres of economic and political power shift from Europe and North America to South and East Asia. The new middle classes of China and India will be the drivers of new patterns of consumer taste and culture over the next century. This is a planetary social revolution of historic importance. But how much do we know about these new groups that are coming into being and changing the shape of global society? What drives them and motivates them? What values and emotions move them and inform them? Shrinking the Planet attempts to provide an answer to this question through an in-depth exploration of one of the most significant and rapidly expanding ?culture industries? in countries with rapidly expanding new middle-classes; psychotherapy. In Russia, India and China, psychotherapy has gone from being marginalised or even illegal in recent years to being a mass culture industry involving hundreds of thousands of members of the new middle-classes. Through in-depth participant observation with trainee psychotherapists in these three countries the project aims to provide a snapshot of the emerging subjectivities of these new social groups that will shape global culture over the coming century. Three anthropologists will conduct fieldwork in each of the three countries in a psychotherapy training institute; Christ University Bangalore, The China American Psychoanalytic Alliance and a private psychotherapy training centre in Russia. Project members will also conduct interviews with recently qualified therapists to construct a unique document of these world-views as they come into being.

StP is a comparative ethnographic analysis of the formation of new global subjectivities and identities, often described as 'new middle classes' through the study of these groups' rapidly growing participation in psychotherapeutic practices, that were previously largely considered to be 'Western'. StP will explore the experience of a new generation of therapists, both in training and as practitioners, and their new middle-class clientele. Three researchers will conduct fieldwork in Russia, India and China; each of which has a widely reported growth in middle-class individual psychotherapy. In so doing, StP will provide a unique understanding of the differences and similarities in management of the interpersonal relational obligations and intrapersonal moral dilemmas that members of these emerging groups grapple with in the process of forging new identities. Project participants will trace the specific conflicts by which these new middle-class therapeutic subjectivities are framed and formed in specific social contexts. Through this process, StP will address two primary research objectives, central to an understanding of contemporary global social change. 1. A deeper understanding of the subjective personal elements of the rise of such new groups and its relationship to contested idioms such as 'individualism' and 'culture' globally. 2. The documentation of the changing nature of psychotherapy as an example of a cultural industry that is de-centering away from the West. In so doing StP will not only add to our academic understanding of the rise of new social groupings and of psychotherapy as an example of an increasingly globalised cultural practice. Its findings will also be of practical use in the development of best practice in psychotherapy training in these locations outside of its traditional Western heartlands. Through public dissemination, it will contribute to wider debates on global social change and the role of psychotherapy in these processes.

Funding scheme:

FRIHUMSAM-Fri prosj.st. hum og sam