Abstract
In his study of what he calls “the psychotherapeutic turn” in St. Petersburg, Russia, the anthropologist Tomas Matza works from a Foucauldian point of view with a dash of Marx thrown in. The importance of class shows in Foucault’s critique of “bourgeois social difference,” but by shifting his examination of the technologies of power to biopolitics rather than class conflict as such, Foucault refocused Marxian class analysis and macropredictions to the micro-level of power. Matza practices his critical anthropology at the sites where psychotherapists acquire their skills, interact with their peers, deliver their therapeutic services, and experience their own enthusiasms, dilemmas, and conflicts.
Matza’s terminology reflects his complex position. “Neoliberal” has negative connotations rather than positive ones. It signifies the rule of capitalism and the embourgeoisement of professionals in the health sector. “Precarity” denotes precariousness of care. “The psychotherapeutic turn is not simply a symptom, or function, of neoliberal governmentality. Instead it has inaugurated a form of precarious care that intersects with some, but not all, of the forms of rule specific to neoliberal states” (p. 229). Matza thus deploys his critical anthropology at the level of biopolitics: the loci of power, the damage done by experts, and the ethical quandaries caregivers face. His subjects left a world that had discouraged uniqueness and the self as opposed to the collective, but that now approved of individual emotional needs and the quest for happiness.
Matza’s study of postsocialist Russia focuses on the period 2005–2013, when he did fieldwork in the Russian Federation. He had imagined himself doing an anthropological study of emerging psychological therapies serving a new Russian individual, with both therapist and client reflecting the breakdown of Soviet orthodoxies and also the therapeutic eclecticism of that period in the West. In 2005 many American academics still embraced radical attitudes of the nineties imported from France, but by the first decade of the twenty-first century issues of race and gender had eclipsed the postmodern moment. Matza, however, still relies on Foucault and Gilles Deleuze for his exposé of the harm done by experts. To be sure, he is quite eclectic. He uses Marxian ideas (for example, the notion of “false consciousness”) but shares postmodern assumptions critical of nineteenth- and twentieth-century utopias based on scientific worldviews. Foucault’s postmodernism added a micro-dimension missing in the Marxian and positivistic worldviews, and also appreciation for subjectivity and individual emotional needs above and beyond a critique of bourgeois society. Every aspect of society and culture, including psychological symptoms and the therapies designed to treat them, reflects Matza’s belief in the domination of Western capitalism and Russian biopolitics.
Matza’s historical framework includes the Soviet period, Mikhail Gorbachev’s renunciation of the Soviet empire, and the wrenching years after 1991, when Boris Yeltsin smashed the institutions of Gorbachev’s fragile system. The chaotic Yeltsin period provides the title of Matza’s book, in that Yeltsin, following the advice of the American economist Jeffrey Sacks, applied “shock therapy” to Russia’s fledgling post-Soviet capitalism. In the period 2000–2018 Putin continued Russia’s chosen path of modernization, but stabilized the realm of politics by making it irrelevant, and skillfully constructed a variation of a Russian-style state with power concentrated at the top of a pyramidal system. The economy relied heavily on the sale of petroleum and gas; favorable global markets gave Putin a chance to deal with the economic mess left by Yeltsin.
Russian modernization required both the retraining of Soviet-era experts and the education of post-Soviet inductees. Putin made the upgrading of the professional class a primary goal in the political world he dominated. To Matza even a bourgeois professional culture represents progress alongside Putin’s traditionally Russian geopolitical and ethnic goals: “the humanizing kernel, and the conjuncture of emotional well-being and democratic personhood at the heart of the psychotherapeutic turn, is at odds with Putin’s, and United Russia’s, vision of the country” (p. 233). However, the therapeutic value both of Putin’s style of rule and his imperial nationalism should not be underestimated. Eighteen years of power and relentlessly high poll numbers suggest that Putin has learned how to apply balm to some of the traumas Russians suffered in roughly fifteen years of political disintegration and rampant crime. Psychotherapists especially appreciated Putin’s gift of stability to Russia. They believed it to be a prerequisite for doing their work. Some believed that the growing importance of psychotherapy itself spoke of the stabilizing process: their work was both symptom and cause.
Matza makes his points by wandering into a topic (for example, “stability”) and then pursuing it by creating the opportunity for psychotherapists and administrators to share their opinions with him. He did much of his fieldwork through two major health-care organizations in St. Petersburg—ReGeneration and the Psycho-pedagogical Medico-social Center. Through these organizations he met the administrators and psychotherapists who became his interlocutors. He encountered original therapeutic methods, at least one of which is of special interest to historians, in that it reaches back into the client’s genealogy for traumas and other buried problems. This in turn opened up the possibility for studying psychosociality—for “finding links between therapeutic social forms and a politics at a time of widely perceived dissolution” (p. 173). Players in a game of “constellation” might look for the roots of their problem in their family’s past. They might find, for example, traumas experienced in World War II or collectivization. These historical moments no doubt provided an abundance of material for therapeutic purposes and an entry point for psychohistory. One would imagine that the collective trauma experienced by Leningraders during the German siege of 1941–1944 might have entered the discussion, but it didn’t.
At this moment in Western social sciences “trauma” may be the most promiscuously used word denoting psychic distress, but the survivors of the siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and many other Russians who lived through the military campaigns conducted in the most murderous war zones in 1941–1945, have strong claims to a collective identity as survivors of severe trauma. Leningrad in World War II suffered greater population loss by starvation, shelling, and bombing than any other modern urban center. How did this collective traumatic experience work its way through the psyches of the generations that followed? Marina Gulina’s study of the siege’s impact on Leningrad’s children (2015) identifies a resilient population of survivors. One wonders if Matza encountered any of them in the psychotherapeutic community. In any case, her study doesn’t appear in his bibliography.
Matza also steers around the city’s siege memorials and the history that produced them. One might think that the prevalence of trauma connected to the siege of 1941–1944 in St. Petersburg provided a researcher interested in the work of psychotherapists with rich data. Matza often seized the opportunities that arose to carve out historical topics connected to his fieldwork in professional matters. In his discussion of the Soviet period, he looks at habits of mind and institutions that affected Russia’s psychotherapists. For example, they had to take the anti-Freudian path dictated by Stalin and served by Ivan Pavlov. Like other areas of knowledge, the sciences connected to the working of the human mind had to pay homage to dialectical materialism and Stalin’s version of it. Matza’s historical overview benefits from Martin Miller’s excellent study (1988) of Russian and Soviet engagement with psychoanalysis. With this solid background in the historical vicissitudes of Russian science, Matza began his anthropological work in St. Petersburg in 2005, more than two generations after 1945. However, although his research program required considerable human contact, he does not mention any contacts with the survivors of the siege or their descendants.
Did Leningrad/St. Petersburg’s survivor experience and the immense sacrifice made during the city’s resistance to German occupation have any connection with the resilience shown during the chaos issuing from “wild capitalism,” the crime epidemic of the 1990s, and the general “unmaking of Soviet life”? Surely an extraordinary will to survive lived on in St. Petersburg’s citizens, as did highly tuned skills for coping with economic crises.
Although Americans have been sensitized to the Holocaust, many remain ignorant of the extent of Russia’s contribution to victory in World War II and the millions, both combatants and noncombatants, who died on Russian soil. Even in this high-casualty arena, the drama of the siege of Leningrad stands out. Perhaps Matza’s postmodern view of history justifies his evident avoidance of the topic: “History is not a background against which the present unfolds, but a conversational object with which ethnographers and their interlocutors do things.” And, more liberating still: “a dialogical dance around contrasting historical imaginaries” (p. 34). Having vindicated his ramble through St. Petersburg’s therapeutic community, Matza delivers a peripatetic postmodern account of the ethical adaptations of professionals who took the therapeutic turn.
Therapeutic work quickly evolved into different kinds of training of people of all ages for new kinds of lives in the West-leaning bourgeois society arriving in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Therapists became more Western and bourgeois, but accepted Russia’s existing power system. Several forays into the lives of psychotherapists themselves reveal the distance traveled from Stalinist orthodoxies about sacrifice to the collective to self-concern and a search for personal happiness. The new orientation has generated a growing and varied set of psychotherapeutic industries. Its entrepreneurs serve Russian modernization and democracy under Putin, as well as personal growth and happiness. People learn how to pursue well-being in all dimensions, but as men and women, boys and girls. Putin’s vertical power arrangement re-creates in milder forms the traditional Russian structure of power elites, genders, and an intelligentsia of experts and critics.
The therapeutic industries reflect the structural arrangement and also liberal democratic leanings. For example, Tamara Fedorovna and Natalia Ivanovna work for ReGeneration, an organization providing services to the children of elites, educating their emotional intelligence, thereby facilitating “the psycho-ethical reeducation of elites” while at the same time maintaining the divisions within the power structure. All of this reflects both the influence of Western norms, on the one hand, and Russia’s exceptionalism, on the other. Putin still epitomizes machismo (although he neither smokes nor drinks) and is a symptom of an androcentric culture. Matza’s stroll through the psychotherapeutic community helps all of us appreciate Russia’s embourgeoisment and also its perpetuation of a milder form of biopolitics.