Psychotherapy, Individualism, and Class Reproduction: Insights from Ethnographic Fieldwork in Russia

Research indicates that as the global middle classes expand, their involvement with psychotherapy increases. Some studies have highlighted the connection between therapeutic focus on personal boundaries and intrapersonal processes on one hand, and neoliberal individualism on the other. To what extent are these correlations arbitrary, or is there a direct link between psychotherapy and the emergence of new class identities and acceptance of neoliberalism? Is psychotherapy a class-specific profession or consumer practice? Does it reinforce the privilege of a dominant group, or does it maintain this group in a subordinate position? What type of individualism does psychotherapy promote, if it does at all? In this paper, based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Russia among psychotherapists in training who wished to become private self-employed professionals, before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I argue that the psychotherapists advocate for a very specific type of individualism that is seldom discussed in research literature, namely the individualism of the multi-generational family. For them, private psychotherapy of self-employed professionals, by virtue of being immaterial, knowledge-based, emotional, and entrepreneurial work one-on-one with a client, has the potential to save its practitioners from the alienation present in work for the state or corporations. This type of psychotherapy is also seen as facilitating the transmission of refined interpersonal patterns and intrapersonal attitudes from one generation to another, as a form of immaterial inheritance that ensures the reproduction of the immaterial class-specific markers of distinction.