Volume 72, Issue 2 - Special Issue: The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’; Guest Editor: Joanna Rostek

This article discusses the growing significance of psychotherapy for literature, culture, media, and their analysis in the context of the proclaimed ‘Age of Therapeutization.’ It looks at definitions of (contemporary) psychotherapy and retraces the historical origins of the term as well as the field’s development throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It then argues for an engagement with psychotherapy on the part of literary, cultural, and media scholars that also takes account of non-psychoanalytical concepts and methods. Finally, the article explains the heuristic value of distinguishing between the aesthetics and the politics of psychotherapy and it outlines the contours of a methodology for studying how psychotherapeutic approaches map onto the content and/or form of literary, cultural, and media texts.

Against the backdrop of the difficult therapeutic relationship between Tony Soprano and Jennifer Melfi and its embeddedness in the series’ dramaturgy, this article explores what psychoanalysis accomplishes for the US TV series The Sopranos (1999–2007), in particular for its perspectives on serial narratives and their reception. It analyses how select tenets of psychoanalysis (in particular, the psychoanalytic setting, countertransference, and its interminability) self-reflexively interrogate the aesthetics of serial narration and the ethical underpinnings of the audience’s attachment to the series.

A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012) offer fictional representations of the therapeutic process. Each features a female patient who is victimized by a therapist who allows their own counter-transference to prevent the patient’s voice from emerging. Instead of healing, these transferences impose therapist-directed narratives on young women who need to tell their own stories of loss and confusion. After tracing Freud’s changing ideas on transference, this article presents literary examples of counter-transference gone awry. In a Country of Mothers features a therapist who believes her patient is the daughter she gave up for adoption and who uses her own counter-transference to propel a dangerous relationship between the two women; Dora: A Headcase offers a modern-day rewriting of Freud’s “Dora” case study by a teen who resists the counter-transference of her therapist by writing her own story. This examination of literary counter-transference problematizes the supposed neutrality of the therapist and stresses the importance of patient voice in psychotherapeutic healing.

This article argues that contemporary tales of trauma and healing, such as Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (2015) or Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014), model aesthetic structures akin to narrative therapy approaches used in patients with posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. Their readers are asked to imaginatively partake in and to distance themselves from these narratives at the same time. This complex reading process parallels elements of a therapeutic conversation. Interpreting the aforementioned texts is certainly not identical with trauma therapy as such, but there are relevant points of encounter. The aim of this paper is to retrace the intersections between exemplary narrative texts and central premises of trauma therapy by looking at structural similarities.

This article explores how elements of trauma therapy can be used to interpret the play Black Watch (2007) by Gregory Burke. The introduction provides a summary of Black Watch , as well as an outline of contemporary theories regarding the connection between theatre, war, and trauma therapy. The first part focuses on how the seating arrangements, the choice of actors, and the structure of Black Watch allow the play to create an environment which resembles a therapy session. The second part concentrates on how communal movement, music, and dance are used in the play to express emotions and trauma which could not be put into words. The conclusion investigates how using some of the features of trauma treatment results in Black Watch possessing potential healing properties and insight into the topic of war.

This article examines how theatre works as a form of therapy using Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon . Both depict fictional representations of psychotherapy but also use concepts from narrative therapy as developed by White and Epston (1990), such as the audience as witnesses and creators of their own story. We argue that therapy-as-theatre exerts a pull on the audience, which invites them to empathize, identify and understand, and draws them into the “affective arrangement” of the plays as defined by Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner (2019). The two plays bring together the therapeutic and the theatrical both in terms of content and form: in Every Brilliant Thing , the performer explicitly re-enacts conversations with a counsellor and mimics the therapy setting by sharing with the audience their feelings concerning the suicide of their mother. Similarly, in An Octoroon , the playwright’s alter ego BJJ makes himself vulnerable to the audience. However, the play also confronts spectators with hard truths about the history and topicality of racism that they may not be prepared to hear. Within the specific time frame of the shows, similar to the frame of a psychotherapy session, the two plays create self-contained affective spaces where feelings and emotions circulate between performers, spectators and among audience members.