Technologies of the Social: Family Constellation Therapy and the Remodeling of Relational Selfhood in China and Mexico

Mothering and Mental Health Care: Moral Sense-Making Among Mexican-American Mothers of Adolescents in Treatment

This article explores the experiences of Mexican American mothers who, confronted with the troubled emotions and behaviors of their adolescent children, felt compelled to seek help from mental health clinicians. Their experience is situated in the context of both psychiatrization, or the tendency to treat social problems as mental illness, and the landscape of contemporary mothering in the U.S., where maternal determinism, mother-blame, and the demand for intensive parenting hold sway. In this context, the moral crisis of mental health care-seeking for their children forces mothers to reconcile multiple competing stakes as they navigate the overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, moral-cultural worlds constituted by family and community, as well as mental health care providers. At the same time, it allows them an opportunity to creatively "reenvision" their ways of being mothers and persons. Their stories and struggles shed new light on contemporary conversations about psychiatrization, everyday morality, and mothering.

The efficacy of pandemic-adjusted family/systemic constellation therapy in improving psychopathological symptoms: A randomized controlled trial

The aim of this pre-registered (NCT05051462), randomized controlled trial was to investigate the efficacy and safety of a pandemic-adjusted version of family/systemic constellation therapy in the general population. Altogether, 80 individuals were randomized (85% retained; 67.6% women, Mage = 41.9 ± 9.2 years) and followed up 1- and 6 months after participation in the single-day intervention. Numerous indicators of psychopathology and addiction as well as wellbeing were assessed. Members of the intervention group improved significantly in terms of the a priori primary outcome (overall psychopathology: d1-month = 0.41, p1-month = 0.003; d6-month = 0.31, p6-month = 0.028) as well as numerous secondary outcomes (obsession-compulsion, interpersonal sensitivity, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, and paranoid ideation). However, the magnitude of improvements was small and mostly disappeared by 6-months. Further, no significant treatment benefit emerged considering time x group interactions regarding any of the outcomes (although statistical power was low). Due to the significant, pandemic-related deviations from the protocol of the intervention, these results may not be generalizable to systemic constellation interventions in general; instead - considering the previous, more favorable data regarding efficacy/effectiveness and tolerability - they rather call attention to the importance of process-related factors regarding this intervention specifically as well as the potential disadvantages of pandemic-related treatment modifications of in-person (non-virtual) group interventions in general.

Metaphor and the politics and poetics of youth distress in an evidence-based psychotherapy

This article explores the relationship between metaphors and emotion in the context of adolescent distress and psychotherapeutic treatment. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of Mexican American adolescents receiving outpatient treatment for a variety of emotional and behavioral problems, the article examines what I call "prescribed" metaphors deployed in mainstream, manualized child and adolescent Cognitive Behavioral Therapies commonly used in mainstream clinical contexts. I explore the models of emotion communicated to youth by one such metaphor, youth responses to this metaphor, and the potential implications for young people as they take up the underlying models and affective practices embedded in the metaphor. Specifically, I examine how youth respond to messages about emotion metacognition and emotion regulation embedded in a metaphor that equates feelings with temperatures that can be monitored and objectively measured. I find that youth are at once convinced that abstract knowledge about internal states is inherently valuable because it is linked to desired forms of personhood, but also concerned about the limits of technical metaphors to capture aspects of lived experience and the flattening and homogenization of affect that might accompany the practices such metaphors help to enact. I analyze alternative interpretations of prescribed metaphors as well as the spontaneous metaphors used by youth to talk about their emotions and experiences of distress, in an effort to think through the politics and poetics of emotion metaphors in the context of an evidence-based psychotherapy for young people.

Family Constellation Therapy in the Context of Esotericism

In the past decades, Bert Hellinger's family constellation method has become a highly popular psychotherapeutic modality. Although some research has emerged concerning the foundations, effectiveness, and ethical aspects of family constellation therapy, psychological inquiry has neither reflected on the popularity of the method nor addressed its specific content in detail. In this article, I trace and interpret family constellation therapy within the context of esotericism. Given that parallels between Western esoteric thought and the family constellation system developed by Hellinger can be observed, this article explores the extent to which family constellation therapy is embedded within esotericism. By exploring family constellation therapy and thus broadening the scope of esoteric spirituality, this analysis contributes to contemporary research on Western esoteric thought.

Teaching Transnational Buddhist Meditation with Vipassanā (Neiguan 內觀) and Mindfulness (Zhengnian 正念) for Healing Depression in Contemporary China

This paper examines how the teaching of embodied practices of transnational Buddhist meditation has been designated for healing depression explicitly in contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities with the influences of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia and globalization. Despite the revival of traditional Chan school meditation practices since the Open Policy, various transnational lay meditation practices, such as vipassanā and mindfulness, have been popularized in monastic and lay communities as a trendy way to heal physical and mental suffering in mainland China. Drawing from a recent ethnographic study of a meditation retreat held at a Chinese Buddhist monastery in South China, this paper examines how Buddhist monastics have promoted a hybrid mode of embodied Buddhist meditation practices, mindfulness and psychoanalytic exercises for healing depression in lay people. With analysis of the teaching and approach of the retreat guided by well-educated Chinese meditation monastics, I argue that some young generation Buddhist communities have contributed to giving active responses towards the recent yearning for individualized bodily practices and the social trend of the “subjective turn” and self-reflexivity in contemporary Chinese society. The hybrid inclusion of mindfulness exercises from secular programs and psychoanalytic exercises into a vipassanā meditation retreat may reflect an attempt to re-contextualize meditation in Chinese Buddhism.

Language, Emotion, and the Politics of Vulnerability

Previous research on language and emotion in anthropology has demonstrated that rather than being a private, subjective, and prediscursive experience belonging to individuals, emotion is an intersubjective, emergent process that is not only everywhere in language but also everywhere language is. In this review, I discuss how recent research in linguistic anthropology and related fields has continued to build on such insights in investigations of the flow of affect across bodies, the ways in which politically situated ideologies of language and emotion function at various institutional scales, and the role of language and emotion in the enactment of agency. Overall, my discussion is framed in a consideration of how this body of work contributes both theoretically and methodologically to understanding the role that language and emotion play in mediating the dynamic relationship between vulnerability and political agency.