Psyche-Pol

Psyche-Pol: Project Outline

Psyche-pol is a fledgling research-project that works in the space between politics and psychotherapy. We attempt to slowly and sensitively approach material on the subject and gather oral testimony from therapists and counsellors who maintain and are informed by a political impulse. Our working methods are based on our backgrounds in and interests for the therapeutic field. With the open process as substratum we try to  explore the material, our conversations and the interviews rather than interpreting them. We ask ourselves questions such as:

How do we overcome the resistance to talking about and through emotion? Is so-called mental illness a response to the ‘cramped self’ of capitalist social relations? Does psychotherapy per se have a normative effect? If yes how can it cast-off these effects? How can we bring the psyche into political struggle as a political object? Can we find different ways of being together in groups that give space and time to both the singularising force of our ‘componential’ selves and to the ‘common resonance’ of affect?

This research project was initiated in November 2013 by Howard Slater and Tine Tvergaard as part of the Counter Culture/Social Movements strand at Mayday Rooms.

Download Psyche-Pol zine here: http://maydayrooms.org/projects/psyche-pol/