UC Berkeley

Refractive Cogito explores the production of intersubjective intimacy through psychotherapy and visual technologies. I have conducted one year of ethnographic research in Argentina, a global center for psychotherapeutic treatments. In Buenos Aires, I researched “systemic couple therapy.” This therapeutic model utilizes visual technologies like the one-way mirror or Closed Circuit Television in order to allow teams of therapists to observe or supervise live sessions of therapy. Building on my “observant participation” of live sessions of therapy, I argue that this setting exemplifies how late modern affectivity is mediated through the optical apparatus, which includes visual technologies but also the anonymous gazes of the observing therapists and the ethnographer’s I/eye. This visual mediation foregrounds the emergence of the “couple image,” an interpersonal imaginary that filters the normative reproduction of coupled intimacy.

Adding to research on therapeutic lifeworlds in Latin America, the work challenges the notion that modern institutions such as psychotherapy and the romantic couple have produced reflexive and self-transparent identities. I draw from the systemic setting to describe a constitutive non-coincidence and visual dispossession of late modern subjects in respect to themselves. I contribute to qualitative methodology defining ethnography as a genre of presence that involves the use of non-conscious imagination. To consider the ethnographic enterprise as an experience of refractive dispossession, I describe sessions of hypnosis I underwent to as a patient/researcher during my fieldwork.