Institut für Ethnologie
06.05.25: Vortrag im Ethnologischen Kolloquium von Alyssa Miller
30. April 2025, von Christina Fastner
Alyssa Miller (GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies | Leibniz-Institut für Globale und Regionale Studien, Hamburg) zum Thema:
Circumscribed solidarities? Political friction and competing ways of life in a Tunisian psychotherapy clinic
Recent theories of solidarity emphasize the positive role of difference, showing how diversity lends strength to solidarity movements. Yet, across these differences, solidarity is usually ascribed to people who share a common political goal or set of ethical values. Is it possible to speak of solidarity among those whose politics do not align? What forms, however contingent or circumscribed, might such a solidarity take?
In addressing these questions, I turn to the early years of Tunisia’s political transition, following the 2011 Arab Spring. Although the overthrow of dictatorship created exciting possibilities for democratic rule, many Tunisians perceived this moment as fraught with existential danger, as formerly outlawed Islamist actors gained entrée into formal politics, threatening to overturn a prior consensus on the secularism of public life. Situated within this context of fear and mutual apprehension for Tunisians’ future in common, I examine the affordances of the psychotherapy clinic as a space of potential solidarity across a highly polarized political divide. My analysis centers on the work of psychotherapist Rim Ben Ismail, director of the NGO Psychologues du Monde-Tunisia (PDM-T), a self-described secular leftist who provided psychosocial assistance to Islamist victims of institutional violence during Tunisia’s political transition. In doing so, Ben Ismail confronted her own deep-seated apprehensions regarding her clients’ politico-religious sensibilities, as well as a disciplinary landscape where psychological expertise is increasingly conscripted for counterterrorism purposes. Drawing on a series of extended interviews, covering the arc of a career in psychotherapy that spans Tunisia’s transitional decade, I home in on critical moments when politics irrupts into the purportedly neutral space of the clinic, highlighting the fricative stickiness of political difference within therapeutic practice. Such moments reveal the essentially viscous nature of solidarity: stretching the therapist’s own political commitments and reorienting them in unexpected directions. I also suggest how political empowerment can become part and parcel of therapeutic recovery, belying ideologies of neutrality in the psy-disciplines.
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Das Kolloquium findet immer dienstags im großen Seminarraum des Instituts statt:
Institut für Ethnologie
Seminarraum 222, 2. OG
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Westflügel
20146 Hamburg