A Therapy of Screens: Psychotherapy and the Visual Apparatus

The realm of the visual, in its metaphoric and literal dimensions, has been widely troubled by anthropological and philosophical debates which decentralized the epistemological supremacy of vision over other senses. Vision has been understood as a sense that produces a split between subjects and objects, between the real and the imagined, science and superstition. The capacity of visual mediums to disappear while showing us what we see has supported these ideals of transparency and objectivity of the visual. In this article, I engage with an ethnography of systemic psychotherapy in Argentina to consider another approach to the visual. The systemic model of therapy utilizes visual technologies including one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television to allow teams of therapists to observe live sessions of therapy. While systemic therapy assumes a transparency of visual surfaces, I explore their imaginative opacity and consider the therapeutic relevance of the anonymous gaze behind the mirror. To conceptualize the imaginal and subjectifying features of the visual, I engage with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the invisible in order to develop an anthropology of visual dispositifs. Considering the constitutive resonance between vision, the work of theory, and psychotherapy, I take visual dispositifs as the symptom of, and the cure for, contemporary forms of life.