Social Science Research Council

"Economies of Despair: Gender, Psychologies and Social Assistance in Post-socialist Russia"

My project grew out of close readings of Soviet plays of the 1920s-in particular those of Mayakovsky, Bulgakov and Tretyakov-and socialist realism of the Stalinist period. This literature suggests how Soviet art and politics were linked by the project of making the "new person," and by a desire to reformulate the public and private while displacing the bourgeois notion of the "private self." It also speaks across time to the privatization of the 1990s, and casts in a revealing light new practices linked to new conceptions of personhood, of public/private, and of "self-restructuring." Among such practices is the expansion of psychological expertise into a much wider range of locales: not only private practices and clinics, but also business seminars, radio and television programs, and even business consulting. Influenced by the work that extends Foucault's neologism "governmentality" into neoliberal contexts, my research explores the reconstitution of "technologies of self" in post-Soviet Russia through this apparent boom in psychological services and expertise. I am interested, in the first instance, in examining the ties between political economic context and the institutional, theoretical and everyday practices of psychologists who help those seeking assistance. Are context and practices convincingly linked in this case, and, if so, how? How has psychological expertise become a product for consumption? How has this affected diagnosis, treatment and availability? My ethnographic research will also include assistance seekers themselves, with an emphasis on those seeking family counseling. Privatization has presented many challenges for Russians-one need only look to the statistics on suicide, alcoholism, high mortality and low birth rates. Amidst the new uncertainties, who goes to psychologists for help? What are the circumstances in which they seek that help? How is gender and class inflected through psychologically informed self-restructuring projects?

I plan to interview a wide range of psychological practitioners for this study, but my most focused ethnographic work will be in several kinds of clinic (public, private, non-governmental) offering psychological family services. In a departure from the work of Nikolas Rose and others, I want to examine how "regimes of the self" are also linked to personhood, which I take to mean, following Mauss and others, a person socially constituted. Thus, I hope that the examination of the family context of self-remaking will illuminate how "self-help" remains a pronouncedly social practice linked to the complex of familial, gender and class relations. Moreover, the focus on family opens onto how various governmental and nongovernmental actors are making "the family" into a new object. What light will this shed on masculinity, femininity and so-called self-restructuring projects in Russia?