“Maa. She is Me”: Gendered Emotional Climate in the Making of Therapists in India

In contemporary India, gendered injuries such as affinal violence, son preference, and female feticide may endure within families as mental distress among women. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork at a postgraduate counseling psychology program in Bangalore, this paper examines how trainees’ gendered subjectivities are shaped by growing up within what I call a gendered emotional climate: the durable affective condition that forms as the emotional circumstances of a household, where structural violence is absorbed into kinship, recur and settle over the long arc of growing up. Through a person-centered account of a trainee whose path to becoming a counselor was inseparable from her mother’s history of abuse and chronic distress, I argue that counseling training functions as a form of repair of the emotional climate. It sets in motion the processing of the psychic afterlives of gendered injury and equips trainees to partially rework the gendered emotional climate in their natal households. Training-mandated self-work thus becomes inseparable from filial work. Rather than isolating the subject from family life, counseling may cultivate an ethic of self-making that remains embedded in kinship while partly reworking inherited emotional worlds. This finding has significant implications for clinical understandings of the relationship between gender justice and mental health in post-liberalization India.