Overview

Into the Loop asks how, and under what conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing from more than 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, alongside auto-ethnographic recordings of Samuele Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, this study traces the psychic forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Grounding his analysis in affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu examines how identification, affective transmission, compulsive repetition, and hypnosis play out within therapeutic encounters observed by teams of psychotherapists through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television systems. This focus on visual mediation reveals how screens and observational devices both capture and distort the therapeutic process itself—a dynamic that connects to broader questions about digital media and user-screen relations in contemporary society. Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.

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9781478032946

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Into the Loop is a compelling reflection on the intricacies of subjectivity and relationality in contemporary psychotherapy. Collu delves into the psychologically and interpersonally intense scenes of engagement between systems-based therapists and their clients. With this outstanding and fully realized work, Collu offers an innovative approach to anthropological research and ethnographic writing.""--Robert Desjarlais, author of, The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar

""Into the Loop is a compelling reflection on the intricacies of subjectivity and relationality in contemporary psychotherapy. Collu delves into the psychologically and interpersonally intense scenes of engagement between systems-based therapists and their clients. With this outstanding and fully realized work, Collu offers an innovative approach to anthropological research and ethnographic writing.""--Robert Desjarlais, author of, The Visual Afterlife of Abdelkader Bennahar ""Collu effectively and consistently opens a channel between the ordinary and the metaphysical without at all being pedantic or preachy. By moving fluidly between ethnographic scenes and his own life experience is a rhetorically powerful device, he invites the reader into a sensory if not existential complicity. Beautifully written and never less than engaging, reading Into the Loop is like being strapped to a dragonfly: ducking and diving, flitting and flickering, charming and provoking.""--William T. S. Mazzarella, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Science, University of Chicago

Author Information

Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.

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