Feelings Run in the Family: Kin Therapeutics and the Configuration of Cause in China

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a clinical setting in China, this article makes a contribution to the special issue’s examination of the ambiguity of kinship’s mutuality by engaging systemic family therapy. Family therapists are no strangers to the negative in family life. ‘We-ness’ could be a suffocating embrace and potentially the nourishing condition for even the most severe of psychiatric diagnoses. While practitioners understand the purpose of treatment in terms ‘individuation’, I argue for seeing family therapy as a technology of kin therapeutics for working on relational tangles that have caused someone to take responsibility for something she or he cannot control. While systemic therapy may appear to valorise a self-determined, rational subject, I highlight instead what practitioners themselves know all too well – that human lives are interconnected, and I underscore the existential import of their concern for the entangled adolescent therapeutic action works to set ‘free’.