Abstract
Does psychotherapeutic counseling promote individualism? Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bengaluru, I examine how postgraduate trainees in counseling psychology engage in “self-work”—a form of introspective practice mandated in their training.
While counseling is often perceived in Indian public discourse as self-indulgent or disruptive to familial harmony, trainees accept their families in pursuit of autonomy. Instead, they frequently reposition themselves within complex kinship dynamics, looking to break the cycle of intergenerational suffering tied to gender in a patrilineal and patrilocal system.
The trainees, typically “upper”-caste, middle-class women in their early twenties, often describe their identities in relation to maternal figures in the family. Through guided reflection, they try to repair not only their own emotional wounds but also the fractured sense of self of their closest kin. Self-work activates inhabiting multiple subject positions—those of daughter, caregiver, and future therapist—destabilizing understandings of individualism as a universal given into a concept done and re-done in local moral worlds.
By attending to emergent subjectivities, this paper highlights how psychotherapeutic training centers on a relational individualism, where the work of becoming a counselor is inseparable from, for instance, the work of being a daughter. In doing so, the paper contributes to the anthropology of mental health by situating counseling training within the sociality of family and peers, the cultural grammars of kinship, and the structural inequalities of caste, class, and gender.
Read more here: AMHIG Graduate Student Paper Prize Award 2025 – Anthropology and Mental Health Interest Group