Download PDF Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
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Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
Download PDF Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia
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Review
"Shock Therapy dissembles the many layers of psychotherapists’ personalities and practice with rigour, making poignant and nuanced observations about the state of contemporary Russia. . . . The role reversal of putting psychotherapists on the couch means that Matza is not only able to probe deep into the phenomena of psychotherapy, but also give a human face to the flux of post-socialist Russia." (Michael Warren LSE Review of Books 2018-11-01)"Tomas Antero Matza's focus on 'the incommensurability of care and biopolitics' reveals much about Russia in the 21st century. . . . Shock Therapy contains much information about an aspect of post-communist Russia that is seldom seriously examined or analyzed. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and professionals." (T. R. Weeks Choice 2019-02-01)"Shock Therapy provides a beautifully written, rich, and nuanced ethnographic account of psychotherapeutic care in Putin’s Russia. . . . Matza's contributions make the book well worth reading not only for area specialists, but for anyone interested in analyzing expertise in a world in flux." (Anna Geltzer Russian Review 2019-04-01)"Tomas Matza's Shock Therapy is an insightful, careful, and methodologically pristine engagement with mental health services in a rapidly changing society. It is essential reading for scholars working in clinical spaces where practitioners intervene on human behavior, desire, agency and will, interpretation of experience, or any other aspect of the individual’s inscrutable mental interior." (Jennifer J. Carroll Medical Anthropology Quarterly 2018-12-18)
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Review
“A compelling ethnographic inquiry into psychotherapies that arose in Russia in the immediate post-Soviet moment, Shock Therapy examines forms of ‘self-work’ that Russians employ to reckon with their futures in increasingly precarious times. Tomas Matza is especially attentive to the class differences and dynamics that psychological expertise reproduces and exacerbates, despite the progressive orientation of many of the experts. This central conundrum informs Matza’s reflections on the specific contexts, from public clinics for ‘problem children’ to radio talk shows, in which psychotherapy circulates in Russia today.” (Elizabeth Anne Davis, author of Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece)“In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza offers an extensive, richly elaborated, and wonderfully nuanced history of psychotherapy as a profession while carefully attending to the ways new notions of selfhood became incorporated into an array of psychotherapeutic approaches as market economics burst into Russia. Immensely important and ethnographically, historically, and theoretically innovative, Shock Therapy intervenes in key anthropological debates about affect, biopolitics, care, and neoliberalism.” (Michele Rivkin-Fish, author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention)
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Product details
Paperback: 328 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 7, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 082237076X
ISBN-13: 978-0822370765
Product Dimensions:
6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.0 out of 5 stars
1 customer review
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,239,653 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
When Russia broke away from socialism, reformers implemented a set of economic policies known as “shock therapy†that included privatization, marketization, price liberalization, and shrinking of social expenditures. In retrospect, critics claim there was “too much shock, too little therapyâ€: the economy spiraled down into a deep recession, currency devaluations sent prices up, and inequalities exploded. Huge fortunes were built over the privatization of state assets while the vast majority of the population experienced economic hardships and moral disarray. The indicators of social well-being went into alert mode: the psychological shock and mental distress that was caused by Russia’s transition to market economy was evidenced in higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, early death, and divorce, as well as precarious living conditions. People learned to adapt to freedom and the market the hard way: some took refuge in an idealized vision of the Soviet past, while for others traditional values of Russian nationalism and Orthodox christianity substituted for a lack of moral compass. The society as a whole experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. But contrary to the claim that economic shock therapy was “all shock and no therapyâ€, on the psychological front at least, therapy came in large supply. During the 1990s and 2000s, there was a boom in psychotherapeutic practices in postsocialist Russia, with an overwhelming presence of psychology in talk shows, media columns, education services, family counseling, self-help books, and personal-growth seminars. Shell-shocked Russians turned to mind training and counseling as a way to adapt to their new market environment. Political and economic transformations were accompanied by a transformation of the self: in order to deal with “biopoliticus interruptusâ€, homo sovieticus gave way to a psychologized homo economicus. Long repressed, discourses of the self flourished in talk therapies and speech groups in which, under condition of anonymity and privacy, individuals could say things about themselves that they wouldn’t have confessed even to their close friends or relatives. Russia became a talk show nation: the forms of psychological talk cultivated by TV hosts came to define the way Russians saw themselves as they sought guidance on how to adapt to their new environment.There are at least two ways to interpret this psychotherapeutic turn. The first mobilizes the tools of standard economics to analyze the growth of therapeutic services in terms of supply and demand converging under conditions of liberalization. Russia transited from centrally planned economy to market capitalism by removing state controls and unleashing the forces of the market. Under market conditions, supply meets demand, and pent-up demand leads to a supply boom when the constraints limiting market entry and expansion are lifted. The supply of psychotherapeutic services in the Soviet Union was severely restricted. Individual were to blame for affective disorder and social maladaptation, which diverted energies from the building of a socialist society. Care providers and psychologists had to adhere to a strict materialist approach, and subjective approaches of the self were replaced by neurophysiology and rational psychotherapy. Mental health and psychic wellbeing were tools of state control: political opposition or dissent were interpreted as a psychiatric problem, and the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiÑ trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. During late-Soviet liberalization and perestroika, new therapeutic approaches were introduced and ideas from the West began to gain influence. This turned into a full psychotherapeutic boom after 1991: market entry conditions were relaxed, as anybody could set shop as a psikholog or a psikhoterapevt, and entrepreneurs began to advertise their services to the fraction of the public that could afford private counseling. Talk therapy and self-help, virtually nonexistent in the Soviet Union, became a booming industry. Private corporations established human resource departments and began to emphasize the cultivation of soft skills and emotional intelligence. Under volatile market conditions and with the disappearance of Soviet institutions, people strived for stability and points of reference. There was a new demand for treningi (training), koyching (coaching), and personal growth (lichnyi rost) or leadership (liderstvo) seminars. Raising a child also became a new challenge, and anxious families as well as school administrators began to use psychological services to improve performance and guarantee success.A second interpretation, not necessarily contradicting the first, understands the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia as a symptom of the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. In social science studies and critical discourse, neoliberalism is identified with notions of individual rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence. These discourses and associated techniques constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. Neoliberalism extends to education and to the self the vocabulary and mindset of economics: individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of â€human capitalâ€, “invest†in skills and capabilities, and thereby become â€entrepreneurs of themselvesâ€. They are led to believe that they are autonomous subjects responsible for their present condition and they have control of their own destiny. Those who fail to thrive under such social conditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. The cost of social protection, which was once supported by state programs of social security, is now transferred to the individual or to families and communities; and social ills such as unemployment, poor health, obesity, drug abuse, or school failure are blamed on individuals, as opposed to putting the blame on the societal system as a whole. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies. Within the logic of global neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and the population as a whole. Neoliberalism is not laissez-faire, but permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention. The rationality of neoliberalism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained, reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society.When he set foot in Saint Petersburg to study the psychotherapeutic complex operating in various state and private sector institutions, Tomas Matza expected to find neoliberalism at work: as he notes, there is “an extensive literature that describes how the neoliberal reforms of privatization and marketization are not just accompanied but in fact depend on the cultivation of particular kinds of citizens—namely, self-sufficient, individualized subjects of freedom able to survive austerity measures such as the withdrawal of state social programs.†But instead of homo neoliberalis in the making, he met concrete individuals with their ideals and hopes, their fears and frustrations. The story of neoliberalism couldn’t give full account of the way people perceived changes in their environment and in their own selves. The growth of the new psychotherapy market was linked to numerous reasons and motives: happiness, self-realization, improved relations, healing, change from routine, discovery, and learning. Therapists and patients came together in search of an alternative kind of social experience, rooted in an heightened for of togetherness. They described their first taste of group therapy as a kind of electric shock: “It was a new way of thinking, a new point of view. We called each other by first name […] It was shocking how new it was.†Psychotherapy was associated as a liberation of the self, a blossoming of free speech and a new age of freedom: hardly the imposition of new constraints and disciplines that critics of neoliberalism would have us believe. Besides, care providers identified themselves as political liberals as opposed to supporters of free market neoliberalism. Their technologies of the self were not aimed as much at the rational actor motivated by self-interest as at a particular kind of individual flourishing in a well-functioning democracy. They straddled a divide between political and economic liberalisms: insofar as they had political programs or opinions, these were for reforms of political practices to achieve more transparency and put a halt on immoral greed that was corrupting the basic values of society. Psychotherapy had a social and political purpose in Russia; but it was more aligned with the political values of classical liberalism than with the economic imperatives of neoliberalism.For Tomas Matza, the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia is better described as postsocialist. It was determined by a set of experiences specific to Russia, of which the import of economic disciplines and psychological doctrines from the West was only one element. Shock Therapy attempts to describe Russia’s psychotherapy boom following the collapse of the Soviet Union by attending various terrains: psychological education camps and municipal counseling services in public schools, adult training and personal growth seminars, messages appearing in the advertising industry or exchanged in TV talk shows, and a psychoneurological outpatient clinic. Tomas Matza studied these various sites by doing participatory observation: he took part in the kid camp’s discussions, wrote answers to the questionnaires, drew images and made clay representations of his “internal worldâ€, and attempted professional school meetings where the cases of “problem children†were discussed. He shows that psychotherapy inherits from a long story of applied psychology in the Soviet Union. There were several periods when an interest in the subjective factors of human behavior emerged in Soviet science—the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. The early efforts to join Freudianism and Marxism were thwarted by the dogmatism of Pavlovian science and the Stalinization of psychology, which was banned from the faculties and redesigned as a subfield of philosophy. The fact that psychology was based on Marxism did not do away with the diversity of theoretical concepts and therapeutic approaches, which sometimes paralleled Western psychodynamics and in other cases offered home-grown discourses and concepts. Yet even in the 1970s, psychotherapists could be questioned by the KGB for mentioning Freud in group discussions. Modern practicians and academics remember the widespread repression and control that characterized late-Soviet psychology: “In the Soviet Union, there was no need for therapy.†Doctors would give a moral lecture to their patients, lie to them in an adversarial relation based on deception, and transform the clinic into a “theater of the absurd†in which power was exerted in an erratic and contradictory fashion. However, things began to change with late-Soviet liberalization and Perestroika. New approaches to education, healthcare, work, and sports were proposed, emphasizing the “human factor of production†with a huge potential yet to be tapped. More frequent exchanges between American humanistic psychologists and Soviet researchers also spread new therapeutic orientations in the USSR. The rapid expansion of psychotherapeutic services in the reform period was thus prepared by intense discussions and experimentations in the late-Soviet era.As a result, Russian therapeutic practices and vocables only partly overlap with Western science. Russian professionals developed a lexicon of domestic words to translate or adapt concepts imported from the West, or to propose home-grown versions of talk cures and self cultivation. Freedom, translated as svoboda, has a more social connotation in Russian than in English: it has historically connoted a form of “freedom withâ€, and an emphasis on the idea that “we are free together†rather than a limitation on individual freedom. Samootsenka, now translated as self-esteem, was in Soviet times conceived as a transformation of the self that would make self-sacrifice possible. The idioms of dusha (soul), energiia, and garmoniia, which were often used in psychological training sessions, had meanings different from their English equivalent. Through these terms and others, a new language was invented and circulated for thinking about society and the self, providing reassurance and meaning in a time of increasing anxiety and change. Some of the affects produced by psychotherapists have a strong religious undertone: “tears of bitterness and joy†flowed from the eyes of a participant attending a conference by American psychologist Carl Rogers in 1986. Some American ideas and mindsets were transmitted wholesale through seminars and book translations; others doctrines were imported from Germany, such as the “systemic constellations†theory of Bert Hellinger (a “Zulu-influenced ontology of trans-generational connectednessâ€); yet others were produced domestically by best-selling authors such as Vadim Zeland (“transsurfing realityâ€), Mirzakarim Norbekov (“how to get rid of your glassesâ€) or Valery Sinelnikov (“love your diseaseâ€). Tomas Matza doesn’t expand much on these doctrines, and presents the content of the psychotherapeutic sessions in a neutral, nonjudgmental way. Another way to look at it would be to assess their scientific value based on some rational benchmarks, or to do an internal critique of the values and messages they convey. Shock Therapy lacks a detailed description of the therapies that are provided to the individuals in state of shock. But even a passing acquaintance with the self-help literature and personal development methods covered in the book can make the reader highly suspicious of their intellectual or humanistic value. More than the “education of freedom†that their promoters advocate, these commercial methods of self-manipulation seem to provide the “opium of the people†that Marx identified with religion.All the psychotherapeutic work that Tomas Matza attended and that he describes in Shock Therapy do not fall into the categories of sham and scam. There is indeed some value in training the emotional intelligence of children, in cultivating the values of teamwork and leadership, or in providing support to people in times of distress. The work of care, whether it addresses the body or the soul, is a valuable endeavor. But it comes at a cost, and this financial burden is not distributed evenly across the Russian population. Tomas Matza compares two different kinds of institutions he was able to observe close-range, the first servicing primarily the children of the elite, the second focusing on poor children in difficult circumstances. While both were concerned with children’s interiorities, the first addressed children’s psychology in terms of potential, while the second brought the issues of pathology and abnormality. The psychotherapeutic turn in post socialist Russia is associated with social inequality which it helps produce and reproduce. New forms of care focusing on well-being and the flourishing of the self are generally much more available to the better-off. Psychologists have been enrolled in the cultivation of the new elite, inciting a potential-filled, possessive individualism through the development of techniques of self-knowledge and self-esteem. For the upper and middle classes, parenting has been turned into a commercial enterprise, an activity involving financial investment, expert knowledge, and careful planning. By contrast, in municipal institutions applying psychological knowledge to public schools, resource constraints and a new management culture have squeezed their services into prophylaxis for the “problem childâ€. Psychological lenses are used for the management of risk and the anticipation of various possible problems: computer addiction, substance abuse, delinquency, various troubles at home, and poor school results. These differential uses of psychology may have the effect of deepening social differences and hierarchies: the soft skills and emotional intelligence acquired through supplementary education can make the difference between success and failure in the market society, while the hasty use of diagnostics with children at risk can deepen the troubles associated with the psychosocial environment.Self-work in Russia is therefore a far more complex enterprise than simple references to the onslaught of neoliberalism would allow for. The “psychological complex†involves both the cultivation of the self and the attention to others, and it has been profoundly shaped by privatization and the emergence of consumer culture in Russia. It provides healing and care, but also reproduces social difference and class structures in a society characterized by deep inequalities. To call this complex assemblage “neoliberal governmentality†misses important details. What is at stake in the turn toward psychological explanations and therapy is not so much the construction of neoliberal subjectivity, but a search for new interpretations and new modes of sociality in a society turned upside down by the demise of socialism. Rather than stratospheric notions such as “neoliberalismâ€, Tomas Matza provides close-range concepts that help understand a specific situation: “psychosociality†describes the warm feeling of togetherness experienced by participants in talk groups and psychotherapy sessions; “precarious care†refers to the provision of care and the cultivation of self under conditions or precariousness; “commensuration†brings together norms and values belonging to different spheres, such as the ethical and the economic, the political and the individual. The book offers social critique while taking into account the testimonies and feelings of the persons involved with the work of care. Psychologists and psychotherapists have their own views about the social and political effects of their work. They claim to be promoting a democratic spirit and personal emancipation by helping people “learn to be freeâ€. Other practitioners invoke the negative side effects of marketization and rationalization to argue that they are fostering social connection. The paradox is that these claims contradict the social context in which these psychotherapeutic techniques take place: they are complicit with a social hierarchy that they help reproduce, and they feed on the anxieties of people that they are supposed to assuage.
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