The psychologization of humanitarian aid: skimming the battlefield and the disaster zone

History of the Human Sciences 24 (3):103-122 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Humanitarian aid’s psycho-therapeutic turn in the 1990s was mirrored by the increasing emotionalization and subjectivation of fund-raising campaigns. In order to grasp the depth of this interconnectedness, this article argues that in both cases what we see is the post-Fordist production paradigm at work; namely, as Hardt and Negri put it, the direct production of subjectivity and social relations. To explore this, the therapeutic and mental health approach in humanitarian aid is juxtaposed with the more general phenomenon of psychologization. This allows us to see that the psychologized production of subjectivity has a problematic waste-product as it reduces the human to Homo sacer, to use Giorgi Agamben’s term. Drawing out a double matrix of a de-psychologizing psychologization connected to a politicizing de-politicization, it will further become possible to understand psycho-therapeutic humanitarianism as a case of how, in these times of globalization, psychology, subjectivity and money are all interrelated

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Eight Principles for Humanitarian Intervention.Fernando R. Tesón - 2006 - Journal of Military Ethics 5 (2):93-113.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-11-22

Downloads
30 (#459,346)

6 months
4 (#319,344)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

“Fake Happiness”: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics in China.Jie Yang - 2013 - Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 41 (3):292-312.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Homo sacer.Giorgio Agamben - 1998 - Problemi 1.
The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media.Walter Benjamin - 2008 - Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Edited by Michael William Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin & E. F. N. Jephcott.
Empire.Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri - 2002 - Utopian Studies 13 (1):148-152.

View all 7 references / Add more references