In Russia, India and China, psychotherapy has gone from being marginalised or even illegal in recent years to being a mass culture industry involving hundreds of thousands of members of the new middle-classes.  In this paper, I provide some preliminary observations based on the Shrinking the Planet project, hosted at the University of Oslo.  The presentation will provide a snapshot of the emerging subjectivities constituted and analysed in psychotherapy through comparative in-depth participant observation with trainee psychotherapists in these three countries.

Keir Martin, Oslo Universitet. Photo: private.

Keir Martin is Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and was formerly a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.   His original fieldwork was on emerging forms of socio-economic inequality in Papua New Guinea.  He is a previous Political Economy Research Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation who have supported ongoing research into the changing nature of the corporation in the 21st century.  His current research focus is psychological anthropology, and he is Principle Investigator on a Norwegian Research Council funded project, Shrinking the Planet, exploring the growth of psychotherapy among middle class populations globally.  Keir is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and is a founder member and former board member of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology.