Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia by Tomas Matza (review)

Tomas Matza's first monograph is an impressive close-up portrayal of psychotherapeutic networks and institutions that took shape after the collapse of the Soviet Union in St. Petersburg, Russia. Pointing to a visible explosion of psychologically-informed services in the city—from commercial seminars on personal growth to private counseling, from therapeutic TV and radio-shows to state-subsidized crisis centers—Matza describes this professional and social investment in studying (and controlling) one's self as Russia's "psychotherapeutic turn." The turn, the anthropologist tells us, is a result of a fundamental shift: the dominant Soviet perception of the subjective as a serious challenge to the collectivist ideology is being quickly replaced by the "increasingly subjectivist modes of understanding individual emotional needs" in postsocialist Russia (38, 64).

However, the book is not an ethnography of post-Soviet obsessions with the self. Rather, inspired by Elizabeth Povinelli's application of the notion of commensuration (86), Matza approaches this psychotherapeutic turn from the point of view of "the precariousness of care," focusing on "the ways in which care oscillates between being commensurable and incommensurable with norms" (9). This dual vision of care—as a set of practices used to attend to the individual's concerns and maladies, on the one hand, and as a social mechanism employed to convey social norms and expectations to the individual, on the other—defines all six chapters of the book. Creating a thematic and analytical tension, Matza oscillates between the ethnographic need to explain how new psychotherapeutic techniques were implemented in various institutional settings in Russia, and the desire to illuminate the political context that made different forms of "psychosociality" possible in the first place. This tension stays unresolved, productively bringing to the fore the key dilemma of the book: what is the role (and responsibility) of psychotherapeutic care in normalizing the neoliberal subjectivity after the collapse of Communism?

The first chapter of the book, "The Haunting Subject in Soviet Biopolitics," provides a broad historical survey of Soviet engagements with psychotherapeutic methods from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the end of the USSR in 1991. Relying mostly on Western accounts of Soviet psychology and psychotherapy (e.g., Raymond Bayer and Wolf Lauterbach), this informative yet concise chapter explains the unstable position of the subjective within the domain of "Soviet psy-ences," as Matza calls them: never quite suppressed or erased, the subjective kept re-appearing, undermining from within the collectivist dogma of Soviet psychology.

The rest of Shock Therapy is situated entirely in the post-Soviet context, being based on the field research that Matza conducted in St. Petersburg mostly in 2005–2007. Each chapter presents a detailed ethnographic account of a particular psychotherapeutic setting. The three chapters that immediately follow the introductory survey depict a contradictory institutional environment that precipitated the emergence of a new "psychological subject"—"in the wake of the New Soviet Man," as Matza puts it (63). They deal with two psychotherapeutic organizations aimed at children, albeit from radically different perspectives. In Chapters 2 and 3, the anthropologist follows the experts from a commercial and non-governmental (i.e., private) organization called ReGeneration. A part of a new elite culture, ReGeneration offers psychotherapeutic services to children of the rich, training them to succeed by drawing attentions to the potentials that could be unleashed but also to the affects that could be managed. Through role-play, symbolization, and other techniques of self-care, ReGeneration paved the way that these children could use for transitioning from self-knowledge to self-management (113). Or, at least, this was the path that psychologists from ReGeneration would want the children to take. Matza gives us little data to understand how successful ReGeneration's psychologists actually were in their attempts to engineer an autonomous, self-reflexive, self-controlled, and self-reliable subject. Predictably, he could not interview the children who went through trainings in ReGeneration (though he could observe them during the trainings); nor did he...