Enculturation, acculturation, positionality, and power: new lenses to better understand the formation of self- and group-agency— a conversation starter

Abstract

Drawing on my experience of being born into the British upper-class and applying the insights of attachment theory, my "boarding school syndrome: reconsidered in social context and through the lens of attachment theory" (Partridge, 2021), offered a critique of the existing diagnostic "boarding school syndrome" (BSS) as developed by Schaverien (2011, 2015), and Duffell and Basset (2016). It sought to step beyond this framework where the therapist assumes that the emotional disability which afflicts the upper-class is simply the result of the "abandonment shock" of being sent off to board followed by possible abuse within the extra-familial institution. The paper mentioned the processes of "enculturation", "acculturation", and the English/British upper-social-class ethos normalised in the "stiff upper lip", but it did not spell them out. It proposed, draw- ing specifically on psychotherapist Anne Power's (2013) attachment-oriented work with boarders, that the likely psyche–soma effects from a clinical standpoint could not be fully appreciated without taking the wider, upper-class social environment into account. Although not specifically identified in the paper, this is what I now intend to call the application of "positionality"1— applied to practitioner and survivor. This term is borrowed from social anthropology and philosophy, but I argue it will be essential in psychotherapeutics if practitioners and survivors are to engage with the complex intersectional and power issues that present-day society struggles with (Stevenson, 2020). This paper applies these lenses mainly to the UK upper class and its vicissitudes, but also to inter-class transactions more generally.