The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
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Joanna Rostek
Abstract
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.
Acknowledgments
I thank Stefanie Rück, Melisa M. Çiçek, and Berkay Siyar Doganay for their editorial help with this article. I am also grateful to the editorial team of the ZAA, especially Raphael Zähringer, Kira Oesterle, and Christoph Reinfandt, for their generous and professional assistance.
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© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Introduction
- The Aesthetics and Politics of Psychotherapy: Literary, Cultural, and Media Perspectives on ‘Healing the Soul’
- Articles
- Section I: Psychotherapy and Serial Television
- Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Aesthetics of Serial Narration in The Sopranos (1999–2007)
- Section II: Narratives of Psychotherapy
- The Danger of Counter-Transference and Need for Patient Voice in A. M. Homes’s In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase (2012): “Story It”
- Towards a Poetics of Trauma and Healing: Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk (2014)
- Section III: Theatre and/as Psychotherapy
- Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)
- Therapy-as-Theatre: Porosity and Circulations of Feeling in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s An Octoroon (2014) and Duncan Macmillan’s Every Brilliant Thing (2013)
- Book Reviews
- Stefanie Schäfer: Yankee Yarns: Storytelling and the Invention of the National Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture
- Marzia Milazzo: Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power.
- Julia Leyda: Anthroposcreens: Mediating the Climate Unconscious
- Alexandra Hartmann: The Black Humanist Tradition in Anti-Racist Literature: A Fragile Hope
- Barbara Buchenau, Jens Martin Gurr, and Maria Sulimma: City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures
