Cult Med Psychiatry

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-018-9616-5

ORIGINAL PAPER

Refracting Affects: Affect, Psychotherapy, and Spirit

Dis-Possession

Samuele Collu1

! Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract The notion of affect has generated much confusion in anthropology given
its focus on that which seems to escape our language. The evanescent features of
affects have irritated many anthropologists who consider affect theory as an
empirically weak or esoteric hermeneutics. In this article, I respond to these cri-
tiques by developing an anthropology of therapy that foregrounds the role of affects.
My intent is to explore the possible contribution of affect theory to medical and
psychological anthropology. I draw from my ethnography on couple’s therapy in
Argentina to suggest that we cannot understand therapeutic efficacy if we focus only
on language and discourse. I ask what it means to regard affects as late modern
spirits and take psychotherapy as a modern ritual of ‘‘affect dispossession.’’ I
propose to ask how affects, like spirits, can haunt our present rendering our lives
barely livable. Focusing on a session of therapy in Buenos Aires, I describe how a
therapist channels the spirit of impasse that colonizes the lives of her patients.
Developing an enchanted hermeneutics, I engage with Eve Sedgwick’s call for an
other-than-paranoid social theory by engaging the imagination as an important
organ of perception in the medical anthropology of affects.

Keywords Psychotherapy ! Affects ! Enchantment ! Spirit possession !

Ethnography

This article focuses on the role of affects in developing an anthropology of therapy.

I take, as a starting point, the idea that critical and genealogical readings of the
psychological disciplines (together with a privilege given to narrative) offer only a

& Samuele Collu

samuele.collu@mcgill.ca
1
McGill University, Montreal, Canada

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partial account of psychotherapy and therapeutic efficacy.1 I will draw from my

ethnography on couple’s therapy in Argentina with a double intent to promote an
attention to ‘‘affect’’ in medical anthropology and to offer a tentative challenge to
the present moment of our discipline.
Many contemporary theories of affect begin with Baruch Spinoza’s idea that our
bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected (2005). When we are affected by
something, we experience a passage from one state of the body to another, to
varying degrees of consciousness.2 In this sense, affectedness is ‘‘nothing but the
possession of alteration as a property’’ (Nancy 1993:18). This alteration comes to
the foreground within the space of an encounter between bodies. Affect is the ‘‘felt
reality of a relation’’ (Massumi 2002:16).3
The evanescent and impersonal quality of affect challenges our hermeneutic
tendencies as it asks the anthropologist to be attuned to often non-discursive aspects of
the world.4 Affect theory, as Kathleen Stewart writes, can help us reframe our
‘‘unfortunate affective habits of snapping at the world as if the whole point of being and
thinking is just to catch it in a lie’’ (2017:196). Eve Sedgwick understood such unfortunate
habit as a form of ‘‘paranoid’’ theory that approaches social phenomena with the aim to
expose, deconstruct, or unveil their underlying historical and cultural infrastructure, as if
such an unveiling suffices to address the phenomena under study (2002).5
An attention to affects asks us to consider our present as a composition of
temporalities that cannot be reduced solely to history, context, or culture, even if they
are inflected by them. Affects challenge the ethnographer to deepen the meaning of
‘‘context’’ and to attune to the here-else, an affective and temporal composition that
emerge within a place while at the same time pointing us towards an elsewhere. This
elsewhere cannot be fully understood through a straightforward approach to
contextualixation.6 Affects thus push us to inhabit and develop an enchanted
hermeneutics that challenges our epistemic practice to ‘‘catch the world in a lie.’’
1
For a genealogy of the psychological disciplines in the Western sphere see Rose (1998, 1999), see also
Hacking (1995). On the role of narrative in therapeutic contexts see Carr (2010), Mattingly (1998),
Mattingly and Garro (2000). A growing literature has been addressing the role of the ‘‘psychological self’’
beyond the West. See, for instance, recent works on the Chinese ‘‘psycho-boom’’ (Hyde 2017; Hsuan-
Ying 2015; Zhang 2018).
2
See Massumi (1995). As Brian Massumi writes introducing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari, Spinoza’s affectus [affect] is an ‘‘ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity
corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another.’’ Whereas affectio
[affection] ‘‘is such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting
body’’ (1987:xvi).
3
For a clear exploration of affect theory see Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s excellent
introduction to their reader (2010).
4
The impersonality of affect forces me to oscillate between affect in the singular and affects in its plural
form. In this essay I am using the notion of the ‘‘impersonal’’ in close dialogue with the recent works of
Stefania Pandolfo (2018) and Setrag Manoukian (2017).
5
Eve Sedgwick, following Melanie Klein (2002), contrasts the paranoid position with the ‘‘reparative
position’’ (2003). Reparation involves the attempt to restore or reconnect with objects that have been lost
or damaged through the bridging work of affects of hope and concern.
6
I am currently developing the notion of the here-else as a spatio-temporal ‘‘unit’’ of analysis. See
‘‘Presencing the Here-else: Affective mediation, Theopolitics, and Therapeutic Dispositifs’’ American
Anthropological Association, 2018, San José, CA.

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The anthropological analytic of psychotherapy is one site (among many) that has
developed a hermeneutics of suspicion to unveil the cultural and historical
underpinnings of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has been understood as an
apparatus that shaped the modern experience (and related epistemologies) of the
psyche. Acknowledging the importance of the historical context within which the
psychological disciplines have developed, I drift aside from such approaches and
ask what we gain in troubling our paranoid habits.
It is through a sensory enchantment that I propose to consider affects as late
modern spirits, as haunting presences that come to occupy our psychic lives. Rather
than taking spirits as an anthropological object and equating them to a Western
notion of affects, I am interested in asking if we can consider ‘‘spirits’’ as an
anthropological concept.7
I will consider affects of crisis and impasse in the psychotherapeutic setting as
‘‘late modern’’ spirits to locate them within current landscapes of precariousness
that are characterized by relations of ‘‘cruel optimism’’ (Berlant 2011).8 For Lauren
Berlant, relations of cruel optimism sustain our attachments to the undelivered
modern promises of the couple form, the family, and the ‘‘good life.’’ Romantic
attachments become toxic when people are unable to let go of abusive or
detrimental relationships in the name of an imagined future that never comes, a
backyard that will never be redone, a sexual intimacy that will never come back.
My research took place in Buenos Aires (2013–2014), focusing on the crisis of
romantic relationships. To do so, I undertook an observant participation of over two
hundred hours of live psychotherapy, mostly behind one-way mirrors.9 This was
made possible by the particular therapeutic model I researched, systemic therapy,
which utilizes visual technologies such as the one-way mirror and Closed-Circuit
Television (CCTV) to allow teams of therapists to observe or supervise live therapy.
Argentina offers a privileged milieu within which to study psychotherapeutic
practices as it is one of the nations in the world with the highest concentration of
psychoanalytic, and more generally, psychological practitioners per capita.10 From
TV shows to political discourse, from taxi drivers to intellectuals, a ‘‘psy-idiom’’
characterizes the cultural and affective background of Argentina, its national
narrative, and its ordinary life (Plotkin 2001, 2003; Vezzetti 1996).11
7
As wonderfully suggested by anonymous Reviewer #2, my intent is to trouble ‘‘the classic tendency to
re-interpret the ‘spirits’ of anthropological Others through social scientific frames (which implicitly
inherit modern ’disenchanted’ theories of the psyche in spite of explicit critiques).’’
8
I am also thinking with Elizabeth Povinelli’s use of ‘‘late liberal’’ understood as the governance of
difference and markets that has developed as a response to neoliberal socio-economic crises (2016).
9
In my work I describe the ontological affinities between the visual apparatus and romantic love (Collu
2016). On the ‘‘observation of participation’’ see Barbara Tedlock (1991).
10
The WHO estimated in 2005 that there were 154 psychologists – including psychoanalysts – for every
100,000 inhabitants, making Argentina the country with the most psychologists per capita in the world (in
Marsilli-Vargas 2016:136). See also Brotherton (2016), and Romero (2012).
11
The psy-idiom has been considered an Argentinean ‘‘secular theodicy’’ addressing individual malaise
together with political and economic crisis (Visacovsky 2009:60). See Mariano Plotkin and Sergio
Visacovsky (2008) for a critical reading (cf. Bleichmar 2007). Marsilli-Vargas defines the psychoan-
alytically inflected structure of attention in Buenos Aires as a listening genre inhabiting ordinary
hermeneutics (2014).

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The widespread psychological culture and the familiarity of patients and

therapists with anthropology eased my access to live psychotherapy. In addition, the
fact that one of the pioneers of systemic therapy—Gregory Bateson—was an
anthropologist helped me contextualize my own presence behind the one-way
mirror to Argentinean patients and therapists.12 Following therapists in training or
accompanying other psychotherapists, I observed the observed (patients) while
observing their observers (therapists).13
Session after session, I paid increasing attention to the way atmospheres and
affective intensities would travel across visual mediums, bodies, and environments
to determine the course of a therapy session, and orient my ethnographic work. In
what follows, I ask what it means to look at couples in therapy as affectively
‘‘possessed’’ and how we can describe psychotherapy as a practice of ‘‘affect
dispossession.’’ The idea that affects are to be considered late modern spirits does
not come from my ethnographic field of attention in the strict sense. It is an analytic
decision rather than a ‘‘emic’’ articulation. To activate the capacity of affects to
become a hermeneutic angle for medical anthropology we might have to accept they
are also part of the imaginative apparatus of ethnographers that arise in the
encounter, rather than only ‘‘data’’ supposedly coming from their informants.14
This article is based on a session of psychotherapy I have observed behind the
one-way mirror. During the session, an atmosphere of crisis envelops the couple in
therapy and progressively affects the leading therapist, the team, and the
ethnographer. Enrique and Simona, the patients in therapy, feel trapped in a
repetitive return to a shared sense of crisis and impasse.15 Their crisis will reach
Micol, their therapist, for whom the density of the atmosphere will force her to
storm out from the therapy session. This event will then mark the beginning of an
affective release between Simona and Enrique, who will decide to end their thirty-
year marriage a few sessions later.

In Treatment, First Close-Up

After flickering for a few seconds the screen stabilizes the image. Almibar, Clara,
and I are sitting in a room of a psychotherapeutic institution offering couples and
family therapy. We are all eating sweet facturas pastries, while positioning
12
The systemic model of psychotherapy was developed in the ‘‘cybernetic era’’ of post-war America, in
the context of widespread epistemological interest in self-regulating systems of information. Bateson’s
application of cybernetics to communication theories greatly contributed to this approach throughout the
1950s and 1960s in Palo Alto, California (Bateson 2000; Watzlawick, Bavelas and Jackson 2011).
13
Following the therapists’ request, under no circumstance I entered in direct contact with the patients in
therapy during the course of their treatment.
14
This might sound like a banality in the post-post ‘‘writing culture moment.’’ However, the flourishing
‘‘elective affinity’’ between medical anthropology and the positivist genres of data production in
public/global/mental health might call for a reiteration of this point.
15
All names and major details have been changed. Simona and Enrique agreed to be observed. I changed
the names of the psychotherapists to further protect their privacy. I provide my translation from Spanish
to English of the therapy sessions and of the interviews. To keep a sense of the translation, I am leaving in
italics a few Spanish words. The italics do not indicate code switching.

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ourselves in front of the LCD screen that will soon project the upcoming therapy
session held in the adjacent room. Dr. Almibar, the head of the team of therapists,
looks at me: ‘‘Doing well, dear?’’ As I start responding, Micol arrives: she is the
psychotherapist in charge of the upcoming session. She peeks into our room and
then goes to the therapy room. She turns on the camera. Simona and Enrique, the
two patients in the other room, appear on the screen. It is their eighth session of
systemic couple’s therapy. Clara, the psychotherapist sitting close to me, pensively
picks up her notebook. We, the spectators of Simona and Enrique’s affective crisis,
dwell along an ethical threshold of therapeutic care and (pan)optic participation.16
After automatically adjusting the brightness for a few seconds, the camera
transmits a clear image to the screen. Simona and Enrique are sitting on two white
armchairs. We can see Micol’s back as if watching over her shoulders.
Simona is smiling at Micol while Enrique is looking down at his shoes. He is
wearing a crisp button-up blue shirt. ‘‘How elegant!’’ says Micol to open the
session, while finding a comfortable position in her armchair. ‘‘Ok,’’ she continues,
‘‘how is the couple doing?’’ Simona looks at Enrique with a sardonic grimace,
‘‘Hum… Bad, very bad, very bad. No?’’
‘‘Yes, very bad,’’ Enrique confirms.
Simona peers at Micol, as if hoping that this session of therapy could vaporize the
couple’s recursive crisis. ‘‘We did slightly better,’’ she says, ‘‘but now we are still
doing really bad. These two weeks I felt really alone, sad… I cried a lot…
spontaneously, it was coming from my anguish, I think. I was alone, sad, tired… I
don’t even remember why.’’
Simona continues explaining how things went poorly the past two weeks. Fight
after fight, Simona and Enrique’s week is an endless succession of missed
encounters. She temporarily concludes, ‘‘I don’t know what to do, every day I think
things would be different but it’s more of the same, more of the same, you know?
More of the same.’’
Simona is exhausted and she keeps saying she cannot take it anymore, that she
cannot find a way to escape the ‘‘more of the same’’ in which she feels stuck. She
keeps coming back to the promise of having a life with Enrique but the present tense
of their couple-form doesn’t ‘‘deliver’’ the promises it holds captive.17 Enrique has
been in between jobs since the Argentinean economic crisis of 2001–2002, during
which he lost his small investments. He is more and more angry and frustrated.

16
On the role this visual model played in the development of the ‘‘family form’’ the U.S. see Deborah
Weinstein (2013). See also Collu (n.d.) for an analysis of ‘‘visual dispositifs’’ and the therapeutic role of
screens in this setting. Surveillance studies have troubled the panoptic model of vision, showing how the
heterogeneous orientations of gazes render impossible a unidirectional visual control. Following the
intensification of surveilling strategies after 9/11 (Lyon 2003), these literatures explore the proliferation
of ‘‘surveillant assemblages’’ as forms of power that cannot be attributed to one single ‘‘Orwellian Big
Brother’’ (Ericson and Haggerty 2006). Recent studies consider how visual or non-visual monitoring
technologies for medical patients entangle everyday surveillance with forms of care delivery allowing
(rather than thwarting) individual agency, self-development, and home care (Dubbeld 2006). Through
ethnographic accounts of therapeutic, clinical, and home nursing spaces, these works show how ‘‘caring
practices include technology’’ (Mol, Moser and Pols 2010:14) and thus challenge the idea that surveilling
technologies cannot deliver forms of care.
17
See further on cruel optimism and the romantic couple as a cluster of promises.

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Simona wants to help him but feels he closes himself off. Enrique comes back home
and feels alienated from family life. ‘‘In my home, in the house I built, I have no
say, no life, nothing’’ he says.
Like many other men I have observed during therapy in Buenos Aires, Enrique
symptomatizes his existential frustration by losing himself in the city. He wanders
around, comes home late, forgetting the temporalities of the couple form. ‘‘I waited
for him… then he comes late and he doesn’t even know why he was late,’’ says
Simona in a whisper.18
‘‘Where were you when Simona was waiting for you?’’ Micol asks with a
maternally irritated tone. ‘‘I don’t know, I was just… I don’t know, I was walking
then I forgot what time it was, you know, at work… they are just driving me crazy.’’
Wandering through Buenos Aires as an exhausted dweller of a collapsing
everydayness, Enrique enters the therapeutic space and his intimate relationship
while floating through an atmospheric crisis that has him without being something
identifiable. ‘‘I don’t know, I don’t know what I have to do,’’ he often says with
resignation. Trapped in a job he is not trained for, frustrated by an object-less
dissatisfaction, Enrique distractedly observes Simona’s attempts to break through
this crisis-scape and reach out to something else, someone else, anything else.
While Micol, Simona, and Enrique share a fleeting moment of silence, I sense an
increasingly dense atmosphere in the room where I am sitting together with the
team. I register the static arrival of an atmosphere of impossibility, exhaustion, and
impasse. The air seems thicker as I breathe in a shared silence across rooms.
Almibar takes a deep breath and Clara emits a whispered ‘‘uff…’’
I write down ‘‘thick, impasse’’ in my notebook.
I glimpse at Almibar jotting down notes about Micol’s session. Clara is sitting at
my side, also writing down notes. They are silently absorbed while looking worried.
Two doors and less than thirteen feet are separating Simona, Enrique, and Micol
from us. Thirty years together, 20 years of doubts, more than 10 years of unending
impasses, are delivered to Micol just as they are to us, through the screen.
The crisis enveloping Simona and Enrique’s ‘‘coupled malaise’’ seems to be
descending into our space. A non-individual affect gets to us. The camera, the
screen, our bodies, the walls. This force is immanent in the sense that it is accessible
to our experience, it has thereness, it affects us, and our senses register a passage
between one experiential state to another. Affect is the difference which makes a
difference within a shared milieu.19
Something ‘‘now’’ is different than ‘‘before.’’

18
I am thinking with Arlie Russell Hochschild about avoidance of coming back home to avoid ‘‘more
work’’ in a reversal between home and work (1997).
19
I am here referring to Bateson’s definition of the elementary unit of information as a ‘‘difference which
makes a difference’’ (2000:459). See also Eduardo Kohn (2013: 100) on difference and semiotic
ecologies. Thinking with Gilles Deleuze, ‘‘intensity is difference’’ within an affective milieu (1994:223).

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Affects as Spirits

A central idea of affect theories is that we perceive our historical present first
affectively (Berlant 2011:4), much before any conscious narrative can be developed
about it. Affects run through the ‘‘nervous systems’’ of our socio-political worlds
(Berlant 2011:14). As William Mazzarella recently suggested, the idea of a ‘‘mana-
like’’ force running through our moral and social worlds was already developed by
Émile Durkheim, who wrote about the concept of ‘‘mana’’ as the ‘‘palpable
expression of social energy’’ (2017:40), the moral and affective force underlying the
constitution of our worlds.
Because we are always already ec-static bodies thrown into the world we are also
available to be affected by what is other than us.20 Affects can be ‘‘sticky’’ (Ahmed
2010:29) and what gets to you can be a historically conditioned sense of crisis, a
relational feeling of impasse, a fleeting sense that something is happening, or an
other-than-human ‘‘something–something’’ that catches you.21
Affects, in this sense, are ‘‘literally moving things’’ (Stewart 2007:5) that reach
our embodied existence. If affects are forces that are other-than-ourselves and that
can take residence within our psychic life, I ask what it would mean to conceive of
affects as different in degree but not in kind from the spirits that populate the
anthropological literature. What if affects could be considered as Cambodians Neak
Ta, tutelary spirits that attack Khmer bodies or dwell inside statues of Buddha
(Forest 1992; Collu 2006)? What would it mean to take affects as the force of a
Maoist past that manifests through mournful transmissions of Chinese spirit
mediums (Ng forthcoming)? How might we consider affect as the anointing
presence of God in a church in Ghana (Reinhardt 2015), as the possessing demon of
homosexuality in Malawi (Price 2015), or as the impersonal force of a jinn
(Pandolfo 2018)?22 Rather than resorting to the conceptual directionality more
familiar to anthropology—how are spirits affects—what would it mean to consider
the reverse: how are affects spirits?23
‘‘What an ill assorted bunch of social phenomena!’’ Victor Turner would
comment writing about liminal spaces across cultures (1995:125). Of course, each
manifestation is different and it can be a dangerous generalization to cluster together
phenomena that emerge within different lifeworlds, histories, and ontologies. Yet,
this generalization is necessary for us to open up to the idea that our secular
understanding of affects and psychotherapy are limiting our capacity to observe the
continuities between rituals of dispossession and psychotherapy.24 My main intent is
20
I refer here to Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ as grounded on a fundamentally ec-
static body, a body that is outside of itself, thrown into the world and always already occupied by it
(2008). ‘‘Availability’’ plays a central role in my understanding of the relation between affects and
dispositifs (2018). The idiom of availability is a gift from a series of pleasurably baroque conversations
with my mentor Lawrence Cohen (see Cohen 2007).
21
I am making a direct reference to Anne Fadiman’s book title (1998).
22
Similarly, Brennan proposed to understand Christian demons as circulating through (olfactory) affects
(2004).
23
I am here thinking about Crapanzano’s suggestion that ‘‘spirits are concepts’’ (1977).
24
See further on Ellenberger (1970) and Pandolfo (2018).

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to suggest that Weber’s iron cage of secular modernity might still be populated by
other-than secular presences. If we have ‘‘never been modern’’ (Latour 1993) it
might also be because the Western self never abandoned its registers of porosity and
availability to affective forces running through our personal and social lives.25
It is precisely between a demonic and spiritual materialism that Spinoza
developed his affect theory, as he looked for ways to free the human from the
binding influence of affects that diminish our capacity to act (2005). As
psychologist of affects Silvan Tomkins writes, ‘‘affects are the primitive gods
within the individual’’ (1995:62) pushing and pulling our intentional awareness.
Sigmund Freud himself described the presence of contrasting demonic forces within
the most intimate kernel of the subject. The father of psychoanalysis quite explicitly
addressed affects-as-spirits suggesting the names of two Greek gods, Eros and
Thanatos, as the impersonal and conflicting forces driving our unconscious life
(2002).26
Returning to my ethnographic setting, I take Simona and Enrique’s sense of
impasse as a spirit of their lived present. This spirit could be considered as an affect
of recursive precariousness, where people find themselves in a situation without the
narrative means they might desire to make sense of their everyday. The affects of
our present ‘‘cloud’’ our everyday, colonize our desires, and sustain a sense of
impasse. The affective cloud of impasse is ‘‘a stretch of time in which one moves
around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic’’
(Berlant 2011:2).
Impasse is an atmospheric spirit.
Simona and Enrique’s impasse is atmospheric in the sense that while being vague
(‘‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’’ Enrique says), it has them, it possesses them. Both
partners are stuck within a present they are unable to change or escape. Simona is
taken by sadness without knowing what is happening to her, she doesn’t ‘‘remember
why’’ she was sad and why she cried almost every morning for a week. Enrique gets
lost in the city without knowing what do to and without being able to offer an
explanation. We can imagine many things about Enrique: maybe he wanders the
city because he has lost his job, maybe he has another lover, maybe he is having
some neurological troubles with memory (as he himself has suggested during a
previous therapy). Be it as it may, Enrique brings to the therapeutic space a vague
yet defined sense of stuck-ness and impasse. When we are affectively disoriented

25
For the sake of the argument, I am addressing an ideal–typical notion of the modern ‘‘self’’ as a
bounded and ‘‘unique’’ entity (see Geertz in Rose 1998: 5). The psy-disciplines and medicine have been
‘‘integral to the secular project of making invisible the religious affects and sensibilities of the modern
political/biological individual’’ thus shaping a bounded self (Whitmarsh and Roberts 2016: 207).
However, this ‘‘secular’’ self bears the traces of an ongoing relationship with multiple religious traditions
(see Asad 2003, Mahmood 2005, Taylor 2007). I am here drawing from conversations with Ian
Whitmarsh and his recent call for a ‘‘non-secular’’ medical anthropology which addresses a repressed
religious kernel of modern medicine, psychology, and contemporary regimes of the self.
26
The term Thanatos itself was not introduced by Freud himself but by post-Freudian psychoanalysis.
See Pandolfo (2018: 91) on identification and affects. Bringing in dialogue the Islamic tradition with
psychoanalysis, Stefania Pandolfo’s recent work activates the capacity of psychoanalysis to address forms
of spirit possession within and beyond the Western tradition (ibid).

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within our lifeworlds we are like ‘‘affect aliens’’ (Ahmed 2010) inhabiting an
existential décalage (temporal lag).
When I say that the crisis of both Enrique and Simona is atmospheric, I think of
atmosphere not as ‘‘an inert context but a force field in which people find
themselves. It is not an effect of other forces but a lived affect… that pushes a
present into a composition, an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event’’
(Stewart 2011:452). Affects, in this sense, capture both a specificity and vagueness
that people find themselves in (Anderson 2009).
The atmosphere of crisis envelops Simona and Enrique without letting them see
beyond the fog of their present.27 In this context, a ‘‘depressive state’’ could be
understood as an affect that has us, that comes to territorialize our present, cutting
off our temporal imagination.28 It is a temporal imagination as Simona and Enrique
cannot imagine their future nor imagine their present differently. Their present is
always present (more of the same) without delivering the promise of a coupled
‘‘future.’’29
As I wrote above, the idioms of spirits or ghosts or affects does not come directly
from my interlocutors but it is rather the result of my attempt to create a bridge
between myself and patients that were on the other side of the wall. What is to be
gained through what might be read by some as an ethnographically thin, experience-
far, and theoretically heavy hermeneutics? First, the very meaning of hermeneutics
bears within itself a spirited affect, taking from Hermes, the tutelary Greek divinity
and messenger of the gods.30 An affective hermeneutics requires a form of
discernment of spirits as they pass through bodies, as an enchanted position that
opens up to imaginative and sensorial contacts with invisible presences. To consider
affects as spirits gives them an ontological existence and allows us to situate them
historically. To take affects as spirits blurs the lines between anthropology’s spirit
dispossession and contemporary psychotherapy.31
In the next section, I continue the description of Simona and Enrique’s session of
therapy as it intensifies and comes to bear heterogenous temporalities. I will suggest
that Micol progressively takes the role of an affective medium who ‘‘channels out’’
the couple’s affect and provides the space for a temporary affective dispossession.

27
I understand this type of ghostly presence as a virtual screen that filters our lived experience of the
present (2016).
28
On the affect of depression and its relationship with the Christian capital sin of ‘‘acedia’’ see
Cvetkovitch (2012).
29
Of course, Simona and Enrique, who come together as a couple – an imaginary unit – have different
angles of arrival and departure from their shared affect.
30
On Hermes and anthropology see Crapanzano (1992).For an anthropologically informed ‘‘critical
hermeneutics’’ see the recent work of Jarrett Zigon (2019) who proposes a political anthropology of
potentiality and worldbuilding.
31
Exploring healing rituals across cultural settings, historian of psychoanalysis Henri Ellenberger has
suggested that we should consider a continuity between shamanic rituals of dispossession, hypnotic
magnetism, and the development of psychoanalysis (1970). Freud, in Ellenberger’s reading, is to be
considered the heir of shamanistic rituals addressing the ‘‘maladies of the soul.’’

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In Treatment, Second Close-Up

Enrique is looking down, talking loudly while shaking his head. After many years of
trying to find a stable position, he is always in between jobs. Simona interrupts her
husband, saying that she loves her work and that she loves growing professionally
day after day. Enrique’s voice overlaps with Simona’s as he complains about his
current job as an electrician and the rough situations he faces daily with wholesale
dealers. Their voices are indistinguishable for a few seconds. Like many sessions I
have observed, the couple overlays and intertwines narratives about quotidian
problems and relational issues. The narratives rarely follow a linear structure.
Enrique explains that he is building the outdoor stairs in the patio of the house
only because she asked for it. ‘‘But… we were talking about how you didn’t show
up at your nephew’s birthday! This has nothing to do with anything!’’ Simona
interjects, seeking Micol’s complicity. Micol’s voice breaks through the screen. She
interrupts Enrique’s account of his latest problems with the building of one house’s
electric system.
‘‘During the last session,’’ she says, ‘‘you both mentioned that your relational
crisis might have accentuated some years ago after various economic issues… what
happened?’’
There is something here. In the other room, we seem to prepare for a potential
opening, all leaning toward the screen, waiting, in the present (in)tense of
anticipation. A vaguely specific atmosphere intensifies while a breach is opened by
the undertone of the question. Micol’s voice trembles. Something also trembles in
our porous bodies on the other side.
After a moment of silent suspense, Enrique looks at Simona, then he looks at his
shoes. He starts murmuring, ‘‘the crisis… it is all my fault. I had a family business, a
restaurant, and… don’t get me wrong! I knew I had to sell it, but I did it all wrong.’’
Enrique hints at a difficult relationship with his father who left him a small
restaurant in downtown Buenos Aires, concluding he should have made a clothing
store out of that damned restaurant. The restaurant failed during the 2001 crisis,
bringing Enrique and Simona, with their three kids, to an economic collapse.
‘‘A fatal crisis, fatal…’’ Simona continues, ‘‘I was at home with the kids and…’’
She starts crying, ‘‘without money, not even to buy some milk’’. They had three kids
at the time, and had to move out of their house and live with Enrique’s parents, with
no money, and an unquantifiable amount of debt.
Their individual story stems from a collective experience of the past economic
crisis of 2001–2002, where Argentina collapsed under the largest sovereign debt in
history disrupting a decade of glorious fantasies of modernity and economic
growth.32
Enrique’s interpretation of the event emerges as an individualizing etiology
without ever being discharged over external (social, political, economic) factors:
‘‘the crisis, it was my fault,’’ he repeats several times throughout the session.

32
For an anthropology of the Argentinean crisis see D’Avella (2014), Muir (2015, 2016), and
Visacovsky (2010). For an account of the economic collapse from a financial perspective see Blustein
(2006).

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Simona suspends her narrative. She breathes in while welcoming a tissue from
Micol’s rapidly attuned reaction. Simona takes her time. She takes her time to cry in
silence while shaking her head and gently covering her mouth with the wet Kleenex.
Enrique keeps staring at his shoes, while drawing an ellipsis figure with his right
foot. We, on the other side, are fully drawn to this moment. We are all performing a
sort of ‘‘scopic tip-toeing’’ around Simona’s outline appearing on the screen, silently
circling around her affected state. Something is circulating, which is not due merely
to quite-common tears-in-therapy (so many times we witnessed tears without being
caught in their resonances). Something is there, and here, and in-between us. We
sense it, we are caught in it, and we are of it. I glance at Clara; her eyes are filled
with gentle tears. Almibar’s cheeks are warmly red. I am writing down a series of
words in my notebook ‘‘tense, immobility, atmosphere.’’
(Uff…)
Simona recounts their experience of the economic collapse. After being deprived
of the ‘‘middle-class’’ fantasy of upward mobility and stability, she began selling
used clothes in the streets while Enrique was unemployed.33 She then slowly made
her ‘‘way up,’’ gaining more credit and credibility with the mayoristas (wholesalers)
until she started selling clothes to shops around the city. ‘‘I was working all the
time,’’ she says with a broken voice, ‘‘and he would rarely help me. He was at home,
depressed, sad, he couldn’t find a job. He tried, he tried, but nothing came up.’’
Trying to navigate through the storm, Simona kept the family together, taking care
of the children while progressively professionalizing herself, thus carrying the
burden of both emotional and economic work.34 The event of the economic crisis
left Enrique stupefied while he was experiencing the floundering of his own
gendered expectations about household economics.
Micol passes Simona another tissue and Simona dries her tears only to welcome
new ones. ‘‘Slowly… slowly’’, she whispers, ‘‘we managed to rise up.’’
Micol listens attentively then says with a firm tone, ‘‘It’s 13 years that you,
Simona, are ‘doing it’ [venı́s remándola] all by yourself! And you, Enrique, how did
you feel?’’
Enrique looks down, mumbling something about how he should have sold the
restaurant. ‘‘I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t. I didn’t want to see her working, and
I had nothing. Look at her now, she works too much…’’ Enrique seems to be getting
lost in details as Simona keeps crying enveloped in the memories of these economic
difficulties. We are drawn to the screen, listening. Micol’s voice delivers a
nervously emotional response, ‘‘Enrique, how do you take the fact that today
Simona is still sustaining the 80% of the household?’’ Micol is now speaking with
33
The Argentinean ‘‘middle class’’ is an ambiguous and ‘‘residual’’ category (Adamovsky, Visacovsky,
and Vargas 2014:115) as the majority of the Argentinean population recognizes itself as being part of it.
Tied to nationalistic origin stories, the Argentinean middle class catalyzes a moral imaginary of white and
modern migrants of European descent who ‘‘built’’ the country (see Visacovsky and Garguin 2009). The
‘‘middle class’’ emerged in the public discourse as the main protagonist of the 2001-2002 crisis
(Visacovsky 2014:224). On one side actively engaged in the cacerolazos (spontaneous street protests), on
the other called out for its neoliberal practices of consumption that metonymically represented the ‘‘sins’’
of the nation (Fava and Zenobi 2014).
34
On families surviving through the economic ‘‘storm’’ see Cooper (2014). On affective labor see
Hochschild (2012).

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an almost provocative tone. She sounds tired. Her voice trembles, producing waves
across both rooms.
She decides to take a break to come debrief with the team behind the screen. I
hear her leave the room and close the door. She abruptly opens the door of our
room, and then attempts to close it gently.35
‘‘When I passed through the door I thought ‘this couple needs to separate’,’’ she
tells me. ‘‘You see,’’ she adds, ‘‘I am losing my optimism.’’ I know she is talking to
me in reference to my comments to her ‘‘therapeutic optimism,’’ but she also seems
to be addressing someone else, a wider audience, or maybe herself. An affect-full
impersonal address.
Almibar-the-psychotherapist reacts more promptly than me, the-slow-ethnogra-
pher: ‘‘What’s going on, dear?’’ he asks her. Micol mumbles something bringing her
right hand over her lips. Her trembling lips visibly announce the copious tears to
come. Drop after drop we are all thrown into a fluid space of circulating
affectivities.
Micol, we would discuss later, came to the realization she had to help the couple
separate, rather than try to save their relationship. She had an attachment to the
couple form that was affecting her therapeutic work with Simona and Enrique.
‘‘I have to stop trying to save the couple,’’ she repeats.
Simona and Enrique’s never-fully-collapsing couple-form is sustained by the
therapist’s attachment to the promises of romantic love and therapeutic change.

Cruel Optimism

The ‘‘couple form’’ is still the dominant structure of relation that orients attachments
in late modernity, despite decades of academic and activist critiques. The romantic
couple, which emerged along particular forms of capitalist consumption and modern
regimes of the self (Illouz 1997, 2013), clusters around itself a series of promises
that sustain the fantasy of a ‘‘good life’’ (Berlant 2011) and determines what is
available for love.36 If on one side we want love for love’s sake (Giddens 1992), on
the other we deeply desire what comes with it: the (normative) promises of a family,
a house, a future, individual recognition, a form of life, someone to die close to. We
keep re-turning to romantic love because of what it promises.
Lauren Berlant has defined the attachment to objects that never deliver what they
promise as relations of cruel optimism. ‘‘A relation of cruel optimism,’’ she writes,
‘‘exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’’
(2011:1). For Berlant, we develop an ‘‘enduring reciprocity in couples, families,
political systems, institutions, markets and at work,’’ despite the abundant
‘‘evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear cost’’ (2011:2).
The promises of a romantic life sustain our affective enchantment with what I
have called the ‘‘couple-image’’ (2016). The couple-image clusters and condenses

35
In the systemic model of therapy, the leading therapist usually takes one break during the session to
debrief with the observing team.
36
See Ahmed on the couple form and its regimes of ‘‘straight’’ availability (2006).

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our imaginaries about coupled intimacy. This image comes to occupy our
relationships filtering and supporting our enchanted repetitions of the couple form
throughout our everyday life. The couple-image, as I conceive of it, accomplishes a
fundamentally temporal work bearing the affect of the couple’s ‘‘future’’ and
‘‘past.’’ The enchantment with the couple-image, in other words, brings to life our
desires for togetherness, a romantic origin story, projectuality, and ‘‘homing
devices’’ (Ahmed 2006:9).
Simona and Enrique feel trapped by an atmospheric impasse related to
undelivered promises of their own couple-image. While we could connect their
crisis-scape to wider socio-economic processes linked to a national economic crisis,
this cannot be the only way we understand their present. The ghost of impasse
connected to their present is an affective composition of heterogeneous temporal-
ities, imaginaries, and practices irreducible to a national or historical past, even
while being shaped by it. The ghost of impasse dwells in the here-else. Their
everyday constraints gather together a recursive sexual disconnection, relational
boredom, built resentment, and misaligned desires, which all bear the trace of past
events but also of imagined futures. The future of a loving caress that never comes,
the future of a different togetherness, the future of their daughters.
In this sense, I avoid offering an excessively historical reading of their crisis and
focus on the present spirit of impasse. An unveiling of historical conditions, even if
telling, is not sufficient for approaching what continuously catches the couple. An
affect that is present in the present is now occupying Simona and Enrique’s life.
Whatever the reason of their crisis, they are unable to let go, to de-territorialize their
everyday from the affective pull of the couple-image.
I conceive of the couple-image as what drives an attachment that doesn’t allow
Enrique and Simona to let go. As they cannot let go, the spirit of impasse can take
residence within the abode of their lives acquiring an ontological presence and
hiding within the landscape of the romantic promise land. How can we detach
ourselves from something that holds us captive in the name of a promise which is
not being delivered?
The idioms of spirit possession, in my view, orient us towards a possible answer.
During this session, the sense of ‘‘being stuck’’ was affectively absorbed by Micol
who realized that the impasse of the couple was also her impasse: ‘‘I need to let this
couple go, they need to separate.’’ Micol, while getting progressively tense and
nervous, was possessed—occupied—by an affective spirit which had to be let go,
once named.
Just as in many exorcist rituals the ‘‘naming’’ of the spirits that are occupying the
possessed is a necessary practice of the dispossession ritual (Ellenberger 1970,
Pandolfo 2018).37 As I write below, in many dispossession rituals exorcists might
‘‘take on’’ their bodies the possessing spirit. In this sense Micol is undergoing an
affective experience in the place of her patient. This channeling, perhaps, is possible
37
On the parallel between psychotherapy and exorcism see also the work of Thomas Csordas (2017). In a
sense, the exorcist ‘‘naming’’ of spirits can be paralleled to our understanding of ‘‘diagnosis’’ in the widest
sense. Medical Anthropology often engaged with ‘‘diagnosis’’ in its capacity to be therapeutically
effective in itself. See, for example, the work of Byron Good (1994). However, I wonder if the affective
‘‘discernment of spirits’’ I am referring to should be distinguished farther from a diagnostic gesture.

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precisely because the couple-image is a collectively shared image that bears a

personal and impersonal affective charge.

In Treatment, Third Close-Up

Micol is trying to hold her tears and I am frozen in the armchair, unable to move, to
mutter, to react. My body shows an initial intent to write down something. I stop
myself. While I bear the weight of this moment, I am thrown into a temporal
divergence, as I relate to the unfolding event. ‘‘The therapist is falling apart,’’ I
think, ‘‘this moment is just…’’ My thoughts slip away as Micol breaks into tears.
She cries.
As Almibar asks if she experienced something similar in her personal life, I am
confused and intrigued (the affectively perverse pleasures of ethnographic genres of
presence): the therapeutic setting has moved from the room across the screen to our
room behind the screen.38 Simona and Enrique are silently waiting for Micol to
come back. Micol starts talking from beneath a cascade of tears. The atmospheric
vapors of the rooms condense, turning into a thick rain. Micol’s reaction has turned
the felt and unnamed background into a foreground, punctuating the atmosphere
with her re-action.
While Clara is giving her a tissue, Micol says she identifies with Simona and her
suffering as a mother who feared being unable to feed her children. Micol shares her
feelings with us, acknowledging she cannot look at Enrique as he triggers an
uncomfortable rage in her. Enrique’s passive stupor is the signifier of an unbearable
gendered intensity.
Performing a therapeutic intervention within another ongoing therapy Almibar
unfolds a series of quietly formulated questions directed at Micol. She tells us she
grew up in a very similar situation, with an absent father and a struggling mother.
The affect attached to her past economic difficulties descends and condenses within
the interstices of her words. At the same time, she repeats that she needs to ‘‘let the
couple go.’’ Sometimes people need to figure out a way to separate, she says. Micol
is realizing that her attachment to the couple image is the host of the spirit of
impasse.
Micol’s present is invaded by her past. Her present, however, is an affective
composition enfolding Micol’s relationship with her father, the present doubts about
her work as a therapist, her affective attachments to the image of the romantic
couple, her gendered imaginaries, her relationship with a cynical ethnographer, and
her surprise about the emergence of this intensity during a therapy she is leading.
Micol is an atmospheric decompressing valve. How is it possible to develop an
other-than-paranoid reading of this scene without enclosing Micol within one of
these explanatory venues?
After a few minutes, the therapy inside the therapy fades away. The rain is
evaporating back into the background, becoming a vague cloud again. With an
almost invisible deep breath Micol wipes away her tears and readjusts her hair. We

38
Elsewhere I explore the ethnographic method as based on a temporal ‘‘genre of presence’’ (n.d.).

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all look at the screen: Enrique and Simona are waiting for their therapist to come
back. They are immersed in, and pierced by the silence. Enrique is looking up to the
ceiling. They both seem exhausted, worn out citizens of a collapsing coupledom.
Micol smiles at us with an apologetic expression. She is ready to go back.
She opens one door, closes it, opens the other door, then closes it behind her. She
is back on screen, back in the therapy room. Micol sits down and looks straight at
Simona, with a severe yet motherly tone she asks, ‘‘Until when… how many more
times you will give Enrique chances? Until when?’’.
I sense everybody is tired. The emergence of this public and intimate intensity
seems to have exhausted everyone. I glimpse at Clara and she seems to be crying. I
soak in the density of the air, breathing slowly. Micol formulates her last sentence:
‘‘I will leave you now with a question. I want you to think about it in the next two
weeks: in the name of what will this couple continue?’’

Abreactive Mediums (Refracting Affect)

The emotional and affective component of healing rituals has been widely
considered as one of the main determinants of therapeutic efficacy (Dow 1986;
Kirmayer 2016; Scheff 2001). Therapeutic rituals across settings and traditions have
been described as working because of and through affects. I am thinking about the
affect-full liminal phases described by Victor Turner’s rites of passage (1995),
Durkheim’s electric understanding of ‘‘collective effervescence’’ (1995), or Ernesto
de Martino’s descriptions of the tarantati (2005). These therapeutic rituals often
imply (and deploy) trance-like states which affect the participant.39 In a state of
trance, we loosen our ties with our self-enclosed and bounded forms of being and
become available to be affected by someone or something else. Trance can be
imagined as an impersonal (i.e. affective) state of being.
Jeanne Favret-Saada suggested that to undertake an anthropology of therapy we
need to pay closer attention to affects. ‘‘Empiricist anthropology,’’ she writes,
‘‘presupposes, among other things, the human subject’s essential transparency to
himself. Yet there is an essential opacity. It matters little what name is given to this
opacity (e.g. the ‘‘unconscious’’): what is important, in particular for an
anthropology of therapies, is to be able to posit it, and place it at the heart of our
analyses (2015:107).40 Affect is one possible name given to this opacity and it can
help us rethink current theories of the therapeutic.41
Our analyses of psychotherapy are mostly influenced by the idea that therapy
works because it puts into words something that was not formulated before. In an
incomplete reading of Freud, the ‘‘talking cure’’ seems to privilege language as the
main tool of/for hermeneutic healing. Therapy offers a language and a meaning to
39
On affects, trance, and healing rituals I am thinking with Borch-Jacobsen’s notion of ‘‘mimetic
efficacy’’ (1993).
40
Favret-Saada also suggested that an anthropology of therapy should consider dewitching rituals as
different in degree but not in kind in respect to contemporary psychotherapy (2015).
41
On ritual healing see the recent work of Laurence Kirmayer who develops a general theory of ritual
healing through the exploration of the ‘‘placebo response’’ (2016).

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the patient’s symptoms (Breuer and Freud 2000; Freud 2010). However, Freud
himself suggested that what passes through language is mostly an affective and
energetic discharge that is in excess in respect to language.
The idea of therapy as talk therapy has oriented our focus on language and
narrative in medical and linguistic anthropology. Lévi-Strauss’ ‘‘symbolic efficacy’’
well represents this perspective. The French anthropologist famously explored the
incantation song of a Kuna shaman suggesting that a woman is able to overcome a
difficult childbirth because the shaman provides a language within which she can
articulate her experience. This would allow Lévi-Strauss to say that shamans are
similar to psychoanalysts in their capacity to provide a language (a myth) to their
patient (2008). However, shamans might not speak the same language of their
‘‘patients’’ and what ‘‘does the trick’’ could be attributed to the use of ceremonial
substances (as burnt cocoa leaves) or the effect of the repetitive sound of
incantations songs (Severi 2002). Patients, that is, mostly become available to
healing through affective technologies that don’t involve language.
With these perspectives in mind, how would one provide an ethnographic
description of affects in the context of psychotherapy? How would one support the
claim that what is working is something that escapes both language and our
apparatuses of re-presentation?
First, we need to understand that affects are not ‘‘transmitted or registered in a
vacuum’’ (Brennan 2004:6) and that affects do not leap from body to body
remaining untouched or unchanged.42 Affects, like many types of spirits and ghosts
we read about in anthropology, need a body that can channel them, or an apparatus
that can make them appear.43 The immanent forces I am calling affects require a
body in order to become available to experience, they necessitate a medium through
which to manifest themselves.44 I take a ‘‘medium’’ as a ‘‘vector, agent, dispositif’’
which functions as a ‘‘support, host, and tool’’ (Belting 2011:5). A medium is a host,
the ‘‘that within which’’ something can pass through, stay, or vanish. Mediums thus
render available the affective realm to the realm of representation.45
The relationship between affects and mediums helps me to reinforce my
proposition to use the idiom of spirit possession: affects, like spirits, need human/
nonhuman bodies that make them immanent (i.e. available to our experience).

42
See also Ahmed (2010: 36).
43
I am thinking about a conversation I had with Gregory Delaplace on the relationship between ghosts,
apparitions, and dispositifs (see Delaplace 2013, 2018). I am deeply in debt to many inspiring
conversations with Eduardo Kohn on cosmic diplomacy, ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ spirits, and eco-philosophical
thoughts about the other-than human.
44
See Mazzarella (2009).
45
In her first book about sorcellerie in the Bocage, Favret-Saada implied that you can write about affects
only when you are ‘‘getting caught’’ and becoming an ethnographic medium (1981). Works on religious
experience and spirit possession provide new perspectives on mediating mediums in relation to the
production of immanence/presence. See Birgit Meyer on the paradoxes of immediacy (2011) and
Rosalind Morris on dis-embodied mediums (2002, 2014). Thinking about mediums and affects, Steven
Shaviro writes that media are ‘‘machines for generating affects’’ (2010:3, original emphasis). I am also
thinking about the work of Peter Skafish, who foregrounds the concept-work of channeling mediums
(2016). I am currently working on an essay on the relation between affects and dispositifs (see Collu
2018).

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As a medium, Micol refracted the atmosphere of impasse colonizing Simona and

Enrique’s life. Refraction, in physics, is the bending of a wave (of light, for
example) that passes through mediums with different density. The wave bends
because it travels at different speeds in different mediums.46 Micol is here
channeling the ghostly spirit of coupled impasse, which I have considered as a late
modern affect. At the same time, she is refracting a sense of crisis connected to past
national economic crises. Finally, she is also undergoing a temporal bending that
transforms Simona and Enrique’s affect through her own personal angle of arrival.47
This affective distribution and refraction across bodies and environments can
become the main operator of therapeutic efficacy. As I wrote above, the circulation
of an affective charge between bodies within therapeutic situations has been widely
explored in dispossession rituals across cultural settings. In such rituals we observe
the presence of a cathartic experience of dispossession, where the possessed often
‘‘acts out’’ the spirit to be exorcised.48
This ritual acting out can be put in parallel to the psychoanalytic experience of
‘‘abreaction’’ where a patient undergoes a symptomatic experience reliving a
mythical or historical past in the present (Breuer and Freud 2000). Transference, in
psychoanalysis, similarly defines a moment where ‘‘the things past can be
experienced’’ (Winnicott in Pandolfo 2018:69) and the patient relives, through an
identification with the therapist, traumatic moments from the past.49 The patient, for
example, re-experiences his relationship with his father while interacting with the
therapist, who channels the affect connected to a previous or parallel relationship.
Affect is the relational energetic charge that makes such experience possible as it
moves through bodies bearing the intensities of a past that becomes present through
the body of the possessed/patient and the exorcist/therapist.50
Interestingly, I mentioned that in rituals of dispossession it is often the shamans
or the exorcists that take on themselves the evil spirits occupying the life of the
possessed. Michel de Certeau writes about the Catholic exorcist Father Surin who,
during the famous possession at Loudun in the midst of the seventeenth century,
takes on his own body the evil spirit possessing the Ursuline noun Jeanne des Anges
thus dispossessing her from the spirit (2000).

46
Karen Barad has examined the epistemological and ontological breaks between reflection, refraction,
and diffraction in her anthropological quantum physics (2007).
47
Similarly, in her queer phenomenology Ahmed writes about ‘‘perversion points’’ that articulate a
bending of ‘‘straight lines’’ (2006).
48
I am thinking here, for example, about the ‘‘madness of the gods’’ amidst the Thonga as described by
Luc de Heusch (1985), where the possessed are liberated from the evil spirit mimetically embodying the
spirit itself. The spirit becomes present because it is channeled through the affective body of the possessed
(Borch-Jacobsen 1993). See also the classic work by Alfred Mètraux on Voodoo rituals (1994).
49
As different theories of trauma in anthropology have suggested, traumatic events are tied to a past that
goes well beyond the life of a singular individual. The affective forces abreacted in the present can be
impersonal, intergenerational, and trans-subjective (Kwon 2008; Pandolfo 2018).
50
See Freud’s text on transference (2001) and his classic case study on Dora, which explores complex
case of transference (1995).

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While Micol can be imagined as an abreactive medium, also the Closed Circuit
Television system, the observers, the screens, and the ethnographer might also be
considered as mediums that distribute affective intensities. Following this line of
thinking, we could imagine this therapeutic setting as providing a form of collective
therapy refracting the shared ‘‘effervescence,’’ a notion that for Durkheim implied
the circulation of a ‘‘sort of electricity’’ generated by the closeness of bodies
(1995:217).
This essay itself could also be considered as a transferential venue wherein the
ethnographer discharges the affective intensities encountered in the field. I will
intensify my hermeneutic ‘‘sins’’ by suggesting that ethnographers themselves
should be considered as refractive living mediums. Thinking with Favret-Saada that
the ethnographer is caught and affected by the field she is exploring, we can say that
I was possessed by the circulating spirits of this situation and that I refracted them
through my own ethnographic filters.
The image of affective distribution or refraction is important to understand that
while an affective intensity (or a spirit) circulates across bodies, every subject might
be inhabiting a quite different temporal and imaginative fold. As Micol was
storming out of the therapy room, I was inhabiting an ethnographic form of attention
while realizing that I had been holding an image of my [now ex] mother in law’s
migration to Italy from Argentina, during an earlier economic crisis in the 1990s.
Simona and Enrique were caught between their past and their recursive present,
Micol was caught in a different past and in the present tense of her attachments to
the couple form. Almibar and Clara, as I will discover later, were mostly worried for
Micol.
Even if shared at some level—we all felt something—affect can be refracted by
different mediums that alter, redirect, and distribute their intensity. The distribution
and channeling of this intensity through mediums, and this is my proposition, might
provide forms of psychotherapeutic efficacy if we understand this distribution as a
form of ‘‘affect dispossession’’ from late modern spirits.

Enchanted Anthropology

In this article I have offered first-person descriptions of a session of therapy where

the main therapist channels-out an atmosphere of crisis and impasse. This session
marked an important moment for both the patients and the therapists as they realized
something needed to change (as mentioned above, a few sessions later Simona and
Enrique decided to separate).
Taking affects as late modern spirits allows us to revisit psychotherapy as a
contemporary technology of ‘‘affect dispossession’’ and can help us imagine late
modern spirt as having an ontological presence within our ordinary lives. As I wrote
above, a reasonable push back to my proposition is that the idioms of ‘‘spirits’’ and
‘‘affects’’ are not empirically available within my ethnographic field of attention. To
address this critique, I could find empirically acceptable data to show that I have
developed this hermeneutic frame because I have absorbed an ‘‘Argentinean’’ way
to entangle psychoanalytically inflected concepts with forms of magical realism and

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spiritual secularism. However, this would go against my attempt to develop an

other-than-paranoid approach. Affect theory challenges current regimes of the
empirical by asking us to stretch our imaginative faculties. In the present moment of
our discipline, the imagination is often still understood as separate from experience
and as the locus of illusion and error. However, the imagination should be
considered as an ‘‘organ of active perception’’ (Pandolfo 2018:175), a sensual
faculty of the body that registers the affective quality of an encounter between
human/nonhuman bodies.51
As affects are considered the forces of an encounter, the active role of the
imagination is central ‘‘to create new spaces for thinking about and imagining what
might be going on’’ (Stewart 2011:445) within the space of such encounter. To
imagine affects as ‘‘spirits,’’ in this sense, requires a form of enchanted
hermeneutics that foregrounds the capacity of the empirical to activate our
imagination. In this sense, I am inspired and in resonance with the enchanting and
imaginal anthropologies of Lisa Stevenson (2014) and Robert Desjarlais (2018).
Another possible critique is that while enforcing a hermeneutic frame that is not
in my ‘‘data’’ I am also providing a mystical or almost religious perspective to
understand a secular practice like psychotherapy. In a way, this is precisely my
intent. I have proposed to think about affects as late modern spirits to develop an
enchanted hermeneutics. To be enchanted while enchanting our secular apparatuses
of capture creates bridges towards a processual reality in becoming that we have the
tendency to enclose within paranoid anthropological theory.
But after all this, the question remains: How can we be dispossessed from the
affects that are squeezing us into a recursive return to attachments that are thwarting
our becoming instead of promoting our flourishing?

Coda

Almibar promptly turns off the screen. It is ‘‘us’’ again: we all peer into each other’s
eyes. It is a subtle passage from the dry eye of the camera to our wet eyes. Almibar
comments briefly on the session, saying that Simona is progressively gaining her
independence and that she is emotionally ready to leave him, if she will be able to
let go. Micol comes back into the room. She tries not to cry for a few seconds then
starts crying again, even more deeply. I am frozen in the chair as I stare at her,
unable to say anything. She breathes in deeply, and then runs to the bathroom to cry.
Almibar seems calm, but his cheeks are burning red. I rub my eyes squeezing out a
teardrop while caught within the fragments of multiple temporalities entangling
personal and non-personal histories. Micol comes back in the room, having
exhausted her tears.
She sits down and takes a deep breath.

51
On the imagination as a site of knowledge production and the mundo imaginalis as a faculty of the soul
see Stefania Pandolfo’s recent work (2018). Giorgio Agamben writes about the ‘‘destruction of
experience’’ after medieval times and the progressive separation of the imagination from experience
(2007).

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Acknowledgments I am thankful to the therapists and patients who generously allowed me to participate
in their professional and personal lives. Micol has been an amazing source of affective inspiration
together with the therapists I call here Almibar, Wanda, and Clara. Thank you. The conceptual gifts of
Lawrence Cohen, Ian Whitmarsh, Stefania Pandolfo, and Yanina Gori are always already present in this
article. Bruno Reinhardt, Dylan Fagan, Cheryl Smith, Mila Djordjevic, Gabriel Coren, Jarret Zigon, Silvia
Tidney, Jason Throop, Cristiana Giordano, Vanessa McCuaig, Cristina Yepez, Amélie Ward, Emad
Mortazavi, Vincent Laliberté, and Robert Desjarlais, provided important comments to different versions
of this manuscript. Emily Ng has been fundamental. Haley Baird reframed my imagination about the
work of therapy, love, and spirits.

Compliance with Ethical Standards

Conflict of interest The author has received the International Fieldwork Grant from the Institute of
International Studies, UC Berkeley, to undertake the fieldwork research this article is based on (2013).
The author states that there is no conflict of interest influencing the article’s content.

Ethical Approval All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance
with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964
Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The research was
approved by the UC Berkeley Human Research protection Program.

Informed Consent Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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