During my time as a post-doctoral researcher on the “Shrinking the Planet” project, I worked as a both a participant in and observer of psychotherapeutic training programs.
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, I spent the first two years conducting psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic counselor training in the United States while using new telecommunication technologies to conduct remote interviews with psychotherapy students in South and Northeast India.
While I was unable to conduct actual fieldwork in India for this project (having to exit the project early due to family issues), I was able to listen and analyze enough to garner some understanding of the differences between trainees in the contemporary United States and those in contemporary India. These observations led to several seminar and conference papers, as well as ongoing work that has yet to be published. One of the insights that my preliminary work revealed concerned how clinicians in both countries think about the empathic or supportive side of a therapeutic process.
In both India and the United States, there is understandably a great deal of anxiety and confusion among psychotherapy trainees about what it means to be empathic and supportive of the struggles and suffering their clients bring to sessions. My sense from Indian trainees is that the largest portion of empathy-anxiety has to do with the field being a middle-class vocation and how this assumption marks a psychotherapist as, to borrow a phrase from Lacan, a “subject supposed to know.” There is a collective sentiment that one must “fake it till they make it”—and, eventually, a sort of teacher-disciple (guru-shishya) model of relating via expertise (in supervision, education, and consultation) will come into being. The client accepts the virtuous attempt or does not, but there is little perseveration about whether or not the therapist-in-training is actually being “authentic.”
This virtue ethic, if we could call it that, can be contrasted with American students’ anxieties, which seem to put less emphasis on vocation and more on a “style-of-life”—since being a psychotherapist is supposed to say more about living “true to one’s experiences” rather than one’s status or career aspirations. The secular “calling” is stripped of vocational implications or class status and naturalized in terms of the truth of personal experience.
To put it in the words of a fellow student in Chicago training to be a psychodynamic counselor: “You are either an empath or you are not, and no amount of trying to think through the countertransference—is this feeling mine or the patient’s?—will help…I really think that’s where the rubber meets the road; if you’ve suffered enormously and have been through treatment, empathy just comes more naturally.”
To my mind, this difference is an important one in understanding not the cultural but the political-economic discrepancies between the desires, motivations, and expectations of trainees in both countries. Psychotherapists in India are beholden to a political economy of expertise, a top-down model of training that emphasizes mastery over the intimacies of connection and the personal vagaries of the clinician. This is not expected in cultural life writ large, which is soaked with feeling, sentiment, idioms of emotional truth, the wish that the other can understand, and so much more. But the specialization, the accreditation, and other institutional framings of turning a basic mode human relating into a career make becoming a psychotherapist much less romantic in India’s ongoing aspirational political economy. Why this is different in the current American political-economic climate is a question that I am still engaged in answering.