After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia witnessed a dramatic increase in psychotherapeutic options, which promoted social connection while advancing new forms of capitalist subjectivity amid often-wrenching social and economic transformations. In Shock Therapy Tomas Matza provides an ethnography of post-Soviet Saint Petersburg, following psychotherapists, psychologists, and their clients as they navigate the challenges of post-Soviet life. Juxtaposing personal growth and success seminars for elites with crisis counseling and remedial interventions for those on public assistance, Matza shows how profound inequalities are emerging in contemporary Russia in increasingly intimate ways as matters of selfhood. Extending anthropologies of neoliberalism and care in new directions, Matza offers a profound meditation on the interplay between ethics, therapy, and biopolitics, as well as a sensitive portrait of everyday caring practices in the face of the confounding promise of postsocialist democracy.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Prelude: Bury That Part of Oneself
- Introduction: And Yet . . .
- Part I / Biopoliticus Interruptus
- Interlude: Russian Shoes
- 1. “Tears of Bitterness and Joy”: The Haunting Subject in Soviet Biopolitics
- Part II / (In)Commensurability
- Interlude: Family Problems
- 2. “Wait, and the Train Will Have Left”: The Success Complex and Psychological Difference
- 3. “Now, Finally, We Are Starting to Relax”: On Civilizing Missions and Democratic Desire
- 4. “What Do We Have the Right to Do?”: Tactical Guidance at a Social Margin
- Part III / In Search of a Politics
- Interlude: Public Spaces
- 5. “I Can Feel His Tears”: Psychosociality under Putin
- 6. “Hello, Lena, You Are on the Air”: Talk-Show Selves and the Dream of Public Intimacy
- Postlude: Subjects of Freedom
- Conclusion: And Yet . . . So What?
- Notes
- References
- Index
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