Cultural Studies Methodologies and Narrative Family Therapy: Therapeutic Conversations About Pop Culture (original) (raw)
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Psychodynamic Practice, 2008
The paper looks at the prevalence of audio-visual culture and how it is endemic in our everyday lives. It explores how popular culture emerges in the consulting room and some of the dilemmas posed for the therapist. It goes on to consider how popular culture connects to narratives, dreams and the formation of images in the clinical context. Some clinical vignettes explore audio-visual material in relation to their possible therapeutic message. One suggestion is made that the prevalence of popular culture could intensify anxieties associated with watching and looking and at the same time increase our desires to dismiss and submerge these anxieties. Popular culture in the consulting room reflects a world outside. Psychodynamic psychotherapy and the Media Arts can bring each other into ‘mutual illumination’.
Narrative Therapy and Cultural Democracy: A Testimony View
In this article I discuss my personal introduction to narrative therapy as an African American family therapist and my discovery of the similarities between narrative practices and my own approaches to therapeutic work. I also examine the cultural relationship between narrative therapy and the therapies of a growing number of communities outside of European dominant culture. The article questions the dominant approach to multiculturalism in the field today and introduces the idea of cultural democracy as an alternative approach to managing the relationship between narrative and other Euro-culture grounded therapies and the therapies of non-European peoples which may be similar to, yet culturally unique from, Euro-cultural therapies. This difference is not superficial or inconsequential. The article argues that a cultural democracy view challenges the emotional/psychologically colonizing links based in presumption of Euro-cultural superiority of the ideas of Europe over the rest of the therapeutic world. This cultural democracy perspective creates a relationship of mutual respect and cross cultural influence between narrative therapy and other Euro-cultural therapies and the therapies developed by non-European peoples. 1 Practitioners of discursive therapies agree that people's lives are constituted through the stories we tell and that stories are socially constructed. However, in addition to stories being socially constructed, how stories are told is mediated through our unique ethnic cultures. 2 The cultural domination of the lives of the peoples of Africa, Asia, South America and the Pacific and Atlantic islands requires a decolonization of the therapeutic lives of these peoples and decentering European cultural norms and metaphors from therapeutic practices of non-European descendant peoples. 3 In recent years there has been a flowering of ideas and therapeutic practices derived from the cultural knowledge of indigenous peoples which contributes to narrative practices. 4 The flowering of indigenous therapeutic practices and expression of self-agency in the field are examples of a growing cultural democracy within the narrative and family therapy community being fostered by people from these indigenous, non-European communities. 5 Cultural democracy moves practice beyond notions of multi-culturalism or the simple inclusion of non-Euro-pean cultures and ideas into a Euro-cultural dominated field of practice. Cultural democracy provides room for equally respected voices and cultural experiences to influence narrative and family therapy practice. Narrative Therapy and Cultural Democracy: A Testimony View I was first made aware of narrative therapy in 1996 when I met Canadian therapist Stephen Madigan at a professional conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. As I sat in Stephen's workshop I became intrigued by his work and how famil
Fast Food Art, Talk Show Therapy: The Impact of Mass Media on Adolescent Art Therapy
2009
Electronic media provides rapid delivery and unlimited access to pictures, sounds, and information. The ubiquitous presence of techno-digital culture in the lives of today's adolescents may influence or contaminate the art therapy process. This article presents two case studies that illustrate how cyberspace entered into art therapy sessions and also how the process of art therapy empowered adolescent clients to transform pop culture images into personally meaningful ones.
Culture, Identity, and Critical Theory in Expressive Arts Therapy: A Literature Review
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This literature review was an initial inquiry looking at research in expressive arts therapy (EAT) to see how this field was understanding, conceptualizing, and using culture in their analysis and treatment of individual well-being. It delved into how the field constructed the relationship between individuals and their culture. The definition of culture, health, mental health, and the connection between them was examined. Research also included creative arts therapy (CAT) and its emerging interest in critical theory, why it was important, where it was being used, and how it contributed to an understanding of society as a source of individual pain, erasure, and marginalization. A central focus was how socio-cultural categories such as race, gender, class, and ability, and their accompanying socio-cultural identities, harmed individuals in a society that used these categories and identities for dominance, control, and oppression. This writer wanted to see how EAT and CAT identified, u...
Give Me More Triggers: The Therapeutic Turn in the Popular Culture Industry
At This Point, 2020
This essay contextualises the project [ASMR] Reading You to Sleep. Soft Spoken Relaxation about Pathologies of Capitalism. The text looks at the increase of sensorial and affective narratives within the popular culture industry. In this context, different authors have identified a therapeutic turn characterised by the transformation of collective discomfort into depoliticised entertainment, which is distributed in therapeutic online communities. The therapeutic self-care imaginaries offer a new sensorial aesthetic and tactility that produce tingles or triggers as part of the immediate demand for satisfaction and the urgency for sensorial and physical experiences in the entertainment industry. These imaginaries or trends are characterised by a collective intention to deal with illnesses associated with late capitalism and its pathologies: anxiety, insomnia and depression.
Pop Culture as a Social Literacy Practice
Journal of Childhoods and Pedagogies, 2020
Literacy instruction has long been a didactic educational practicewith the goal of teaching children how to read and write. In contrast, emergent literacy pedagogies are multifaceted, recognizing the social role of a child's life in shaping their ability to understand and to be understood. Considering the methodologies of emergent literacy, this literature review examines the value of popular culture in facilitating and restricting children's access to play with their peers while contesting children as passive consumers. Additionally, it argues for early childhood educators to examine their own biases towards middle-class pedagogical values while making space for children's popular culture infused texts and narratives in the classroom.
The Postmodern Language of Therapy: At the Nexus of Culture and Family∗
Journal of Systemic Therapies, 1993
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Psychoanalysis and pop culture : myths in the contemporary era
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What does pop culture have to say about the subjects of our time? In this article, the authors propose a way of reading the productions of pop culture betting that, in the contemporaneity, it flourishes, in the territory traditionally reserved for mythology, as enunciator of the modes of subjectivation. In the psychoanalytic approach of myths from Freud and Lacan, the function of covering the Real of the helplessness, in a rationalist era, is played by fictions that leave traces and make it possible, through variance and repetition, to unveil the underlying structure that engenders them. Finally, it is proposed that if these productions are consumed with such voracity, it is because they say something about the subjects who are targeted – that is, about the subjectivity of this time.