Publisher's Synopsis
"Into the Loop is an experimental ethnography of psychotherapy and hypnosis practices. Drawing on ethnographic research in Buenos Aires observing Systemic couples therapy through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television and reflexively analyzing his own video-taped Ericksonian hypnosis sessions, Samuele Collu develops what he calls a "refractive anthropology." Through this concept, he demonstrates how that which is observed through and mediated by visual devices is transformed and distorted upon viewing, creating a new understanding of its meaning. Engaging affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu describes the psycho-social forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. By bringing the reader into the loop through writing that mirrors this reiterative process, Collu thinks with therapeutic models to interrogate the dance between liberation and capture that oscillatory movement
