Collective Fissures: Clinical Groups and the Affective Ethnography of Prison

Abstract (English)

This presentation proposes a methodological dialogue between group psychoanalysis and the anthropology of confinement, based on the action-research project Strengthening Comprehensive Health in the Ecuadorian Penitentiary System. The clinical group device, focused on work with incarcerated individuals and prison staff, is not only a therapeutic intervention tool, but also a site of situated knowledge production. Here, the field does not emerge as a physical location, but as a symbolic and affective construction shaped collectively.

These group spaces enable the co-construction of carceral experiences, where bodies, silences, and broken voices become sources of sensitive data. The group, as a clinical territory, becomes an expanded ethnographic scene, where psychoanalytic transfer, group resonance and manifestation of the collective symptom offer insights into the prison as a dispositif of desubjectivation and institutional violence. This methodology relies on a situated, active listening, in which the therapist-researcher is deeply implicated—resonating with anthropological debates around reflexivity, positionality, and epistemic vulnerability.

In line with the panel’s call to reflect on how methods transform the field and are transformed by it, I argue that the clinical group does not merely observe prison life—it intervenes in it. By creating a rupture in regimes of control, it enables the emergence of what is otherwise unspeakable, allowing suffering to be reframed as a structural symptom rather than an individual pathology. This framework illuminates the institutional paradoxes and repositions psychic suffering as an index of broader systemic logics.

In carceral contexts marked by desubjectivation, affective bureaucratization, and the medicalization of control, this proposal invites us to reconsider the boundaries between clinical intervention and ethnographic production, advocating for implicated methodologies that seek to restore the social bond through collective listening.