Listening with One's Own Body a Psychosocial Ethnography of Non-European Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This essay proposes psychosocial ethnography as a method for investigating listening practices invented at the margins of hegemonic psychoanalysis, based on four years of fieldwork across Brazil, Argentina, and England. The objective of the article is to analyse how South American psychoanalytic collectives have been developing modes of situated listening that emerge from the porosity of listening systems to migratory movements, to the urgencies of the world, and to both ordinary and extraordinary catastrophes. To this end, the text centres on a field diary account from São Paulo, where the author accompanies a collective dedicated to “listening to the street” in the city centre. Engaging with the notion of the “non-European” (Said, 2004) and with feminist and decolonial thought, it argues that these clinical practices are organized around foreignness — the radical alterity that unravels transparent and unitary identities — and around processes of disalienation that mobilize excesses, displacements, and migrations. The article's contribution to the field is both methodological and conceptual: by adopting the “carrier bag theory of fiction” (Le Guin, 2021) as an approach, the research gathers seeds of listening practices – attending to what is discreet, subtle, and fugitive – rather than attempting comprehensive mapping, proposing that the porosity of non-European listening, as proposed by Said, attentive to rupture and trace, offers crucial resources for imagining emancipatory care practices in times of polycrisis.