A01=Samuele Collu
affect theory
affective atmospheres
Argentina
Author_Samuele Collu
Category=DS
Category=JHMC
Category=JM
Category=JMF
catharsis
couples therapy
crisis
cruel optimism
cybernetics
death drive
dispositif
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic method
Fritz Fanon
hypnosis
image-work
Jacques Lacan
Lauren Berlant
literary turn
loss
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
mourning
phenomenology
projective identification
psychoanalysis
psychoanalytic third
psychological anthropology
psychotherapy
refraction
refrains
Repetition
ritual
screens
Systemic couples therapy
temporality
Teresa Brennan
the gaze
therapy
transformation
vision
writing modes
Product details
- ISBN 9781478032946
- Weight: 304g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 06 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Into the Loop asks how, and under what conditions, we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing from more than 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy in Buenos Aires, alongside auto-ethnographic recordings of Samuele Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, this study traces the psychic forces that compel people to repeat, interrupt, or drift aside from relational loops. Grounding his analysis in affect theory, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, Collu examines how identification, affective transmission, compulsive repetition, and hypnosis play out within therapeutic encounters observed by teams of psychotherapists through one-way mirrors and closed-circuit television systems. This focus on visual mediation reveals how screens and observational devices both capture and distort the therapeutic process itself—a dynamic that connects to broader questions about digital media and user-screen relations in contemporary society. Written in an experimental and literary style that moves fluidly between the academic, the personal, and their uncanny in-betweens, Into the Loop offers a unique window into the repetitive cycles that shape our most intimate relationships and the possibilities for transformation within them.
Samuele Collu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McGill University.
