In-Patient Psychiatric Care as a Space of Ambiguity: Therapeutic Encounters From a Sensory and Embodied Perspective

Therapeutic Encounters From a Sensory and Embodied Perspective

Abstract

In social anthropology, there exists only little research about the sensory and intersubjective aspects of in-patient psychiatric care. Proceeding from vignettes from ethnographic fieldwork in two psychiatric clinics in Switzerland, this article outlines two empirical research interests and puts them into dialogue. On one side, therapeutic interactions and practices within the clinical setting are analyzed through the lenses of sensory ethnography and embodiment. On the other side, a multiplicity of “therapeutic cultures” and spaces co-exist within clinical premises. In some cases, they encompass diverging or even conflicting aims and basic assumptions about psychopathology and healing. As a result, various possibilities of human sociality and interaction open up to psychiatric sufferers, many of them characterized by ambivalence. What is being perceived as “therapeutic” and what, to the contrary, as a threat to human integrity and health can lie close together and can vary individually. I discuss how closely experiences of ambivalence – be it among psychiatric sufferers or staff members – are related to spatiality, embodied perception and to temporality. Referring to sensory ethnography and Hartmut Rosa’s writing on resonance, I argue that, in in-patient psychiatric settings, the human social is inextricably intertwined with the nonhuman.