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Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry

Cultural Configurations of the Self

June 25 - 27, 2025
Montreal, Qu茅bec

2025 ASI Conference Program

Advanced Study Institute Conference and Workshop (June 25 - 27, 2025)

Recent work in cognitive science has provided integrative ways of thinking about the self as embodied and narrative structures that are embedded in particular social-cultural contexts and enacted through bodily and social practices. This suggests the self is constituted by a dynamic system that weaves together bodily, narrative and interpersonal processes. This framework can be used to think systematically about cultural variations in the configuration of the self that are central concerns for cultural psychiatry. This workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on the nature of the self to discuss how culture and context shape the self in health and illness. Presentations will explore: (1) current models of the self and its cultural variations; (2) the interplay of self and environment in social and cultural context; (3) cultural shaping of pathologies of the self; and (4) modes of clinical or social intervention that target the self in cultural context.

The format will be a 2-day Workshop (June 25 & 26) for researchers working on these issues, with intensive discussion of pre-circulated papers unpublished by participants. A public Conference (June 27) directed to mental health practitioners, researchers, and students will include selected workshop presentations and panel discussions as well as a poster session. After peer review, selected papers will be published in a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry.

Registration for the Advanced Study Institute is now

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Selected recordings and abstracts below:

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Evan Thompson - UBC |听Self-Making: An Enactive Approach

According to the enactive approach, the self is a process, not a thing, and it is enacted through various entangled process of self-making involving our biological, psychological, phenomenological, and social and cultural being. This lecture will present an overview of the enactive conception of the self and relate it to other current ways of thinking about the self in cognitive science.

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Douglas Hollan - UCLA |听Dynamics and Vicissitudes of Selfscapes: The Looping Effects of Bodies, Social Ecologies, and Life Experience

This paper uses the concept of selfscapes to discuss the dynamics and vicissitudes of self- experience and subjectivity. Drawing on Bateson鈥檚 (1972) notion of an ecology of mind and Damasio鈥檚 (1994, 1999, 2010) work on embodied mind and emotion, a selfscape is the self-system鈥檚 implicit moment by moment mapping of its own representations of its own past embodied experiences onto the space and time of the contemporary culturally constituted world. Bridging insights from both psy- and socially oriented approaches to the study of selfhood, the selfscape concept is meant to capture both the integrity of self-systems and their experiential accretions over time, but also their contingency and looping dynamism in relation to their transactions with the world. I use this concept to discuss examples of self-experience in states of both wellness and unwellnesss.

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Neil Aggarwal - Columbia University |听听Concepts of the Self in the Bhagavad Gita: Perspectives of Mental Health Practitioners and Hindu Scholars of Religion

This paper contrasts conceptions of the self among mental health professionals and Hindu religious scholars based on their interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita. Mental health scholars have suggested that the Gita offers a cultural frame to the patient-therapist relationship and a set of techniques to interrogate first-order thoughts and emotions. These authors often articulate positions that are consistent with contemporary Hindu nationalist readings of the text as non-violent, in contrast to colonial-era interpretations which saw the text as sanctioning violence. However, traditional Sanskrit commentators and contemporary Hindu readings offer a completely different cultural conception of the self, theory of mind, and mind-body relationship that does not correspond to biomedical concepts of personhood. By examining these range of interpretations, we can adopt a decolonial attitude toward psychiatry by not positioning the Gita as a 鈥渨e were there first鈥� ur-text on psychotherapy,
but one that reads the text on its own terms first, along with the commentators it has inspired, before trying to find correspondences with psychotherapeutic techniques.

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Julian Xue - 麻豆传媒网站 |听听Expanding the moral self: a Confucian view of mental health

Ever since Descartes, the West has assumed a free-floating 鈥淚鈥� bestowed with attention and rationality, but nothing else. Our brains, subconsciousness, emotions and even our morality became objects to be observed and dissected by 鈥淚鈥�, giving rise to modern psychiatry. But this is an aberration. The classical Chinese, for example, could not have conceived a self separate from our moral nature. They would argue that we simply won鈥檛 pay attention, we won鈥檛 reason, unless they are the right things to do. By this, the classical Chinese stood for a perilous stance: morality before truth. The pitfalls of this stance diminished the classical Chinese, but they still understood an essentially human reality. Often, patients come not to be relieved of pain, or to understand themselves better; they come to become better people. Meeting and helping this moral self aligns us more completely with our patients, especially those who are not 鈥減sychologically minded."

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Francesca Papi - University of Bologna |听Harry Stack Sullivan: Interpersonal Pathways to the Self among Culture, Psychopathology, and Healing

Harry Stack Sullivan鈥檚 pioneering work in psychiatry offers profound insights into the interplay between the self and its socio-cultural environment. Sullivan鈥檚 interpersonal theory of psychiatry positions the self as a dynamic construct, emerging from relational processes and shaped through continuous interaction with significant others and wide socio-cultural contexts. His emphasis on interpersonal relationships resonates with contemporary models of the self that highlight the mutual constitution of self and environment. Sullivan鈥檚 framework provides a crucial lens for understanding the cultural shaping of the pathologies of the self. He argued that disturbances in the self often arise from patterns of interpersonal anxiety, rooted in cultural norms and expectations that impose rigid demands on individuals. His approach underscores the importance of situating pathologies within their cultural milieu, enabling a deeper appreciation of how diverse social environments contribute to forming psychological distress. Sullivan championed relationally informed clinical interventions that remain highly relevant today. His method emphasized the therapeutic potential of empathic engagement to reconstruct the patient鈥檚 self through secure and validating relationships. Moreover, his recognition of the socio-cultural dimensions of therapy paved the way for culturally sensitive practices that address not only individual psychopathology but also the systemic factors sustaining it.

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Andrew Ryder - Concordia University |听Self-Construal and Mental Health: Perspectives from Cultural Psychology

Contemporary cultural psychology has in many ways been built on the foundations of the self, especially the distinction between independent (idiocentric, individualist) and interdependent (sociocentric, collectivist) self-construals. We will briefly review these contributions while also considering recent critiques of this (over-)dependence on these two models of self (Kitayama & Salvador, 2024; Vignoles et al., 2016). Then, we will describe cultural psychology research techniques that can be used to study self-construal, both within and beyond the 鈥榠ndependence/interdependence/ dichotomy and discuss their potential application to cultural psychiatry research. In so doing, we will provide illustrations from datasets that study self-construal and mental health in samples of healthy and depressed participants from European American and East Asian cultural backgrounds. We will conclude with a brief discussion about the prospects for adopting some of these methods for incorporating culture and self into the assessment of individual patients in clinical settings.