In his latest book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, Assistant Professor Samuele Collu explores how we can interrupt the repetitions that define us. Drawing upon over 200 hours of ethnographic observations of Systemic couples therapy that Collu undertook in Buenos Aires, Argentina during his PhD, and Collu’s own hypnotherapy sessions, Into the Loop is described by Collu as a personal attempt to make sense of the “existential disorientation” he was experiencing.
How do we interrupt destructive loops that damage our relationships? Although Into the Loop is not a step-by-step guide on how to break those loops, nor does it pretend to be, it does prompt readers to explore the ways in which affect theory, psychoanalysis, and anthropology can help us better understand our own existential crises.
We spoke to Professor Collu about the origins of his research, his choice to blend the personal with the academic, and how the compulsive repetitions in the relationships documented within Into the Loop mirror his ongoing research into our modern-day compulsive attachments to our screens.
Q: The introduction of Into the Loop begins in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2013. Why did you choose to begin the book here, and how did the idea for Into the Loop come about?
A: The book opens with a scene from a therapeutic session I have observed in Argentina through a one-way mirror. It’s quite an intense scene that folds the reader into some of the ethnographic complexities of my research—one anthropologist observing a group of therapists observing a live session of couples therapy through a one-way mirror and a closed-circuit television system. As I write in the introduction, my angle of arrival to Into the Loop, and the question of how to interrupt a loop, or drift aside from it, was deeply personal. As a PhD student in anthropology, I began reading about cybernetics and systemic couples therapy during a period of my life when I was interested in finding a way to improve, reconfigure, or interrupt the loops haunting my own romantic relationship. With a degree of ambitious arrogance, I convinced myself that studying and researching couples therapy, instead of just going to couples therapy, could help even more… (I know!). So, when I decided to do my research in Buenos Aires, I was floating through a foggy confusion. I didn’t know what to do with my life, and Argentina seemed like an easy enough choice considering my partner’s family ties there. Drifting through the haze of an existential disorientation, I landed in Argentina tethering myself to an obsessive question: How do you interrupt a loop?
Argentina, it turns out, was kind of the perfect place where to be lost, to drift through the folds of an open question, to wander in a sleepless crisis mode bouncing from one asado to another at 6 a.m., to stumble upon all sorts of technicians, magicians, and artists of the psyche.
Argentina is indeed a unique context for the study of psychotherapeutic treatments, being the country with the highest number of therapeutic practitioners per capita in the world. Argentina has long been known to scholars of the psychological disciplines for its exceptional relationship with psychoanalysis in particular. For heterogeneous historical reasons, which could be connected to migratory flows as well as the insertion of psychoanalysis into the public health system in the 1960s, in Argentina psychoanalytic culture permeates political discourse, everyday conversations, and the media sphere. Especially in Buenos Aires, you could end up talking about psychoanalysis with your taxi driver, or hear a politician use psychoanalytic language to address national issues, or talk to a friend who started going to psychoanalysis because they just got pregnant and don’t want to pass their traumas on to the baby…
Q: You’ve included autoethnographic recordings of your own hypnotherapy sessions. Why did you choose to experiment with the form of the book by blending the academic with the personal? What commonalities or challenges did you encounter throughout the writing process, particularly when it comes to including your own personal experiences?
A: In the last chapter, the book turns to the recordings of my own sessions of hypnotherapy, which I underwent when I was doing my research in Argentina. In a book about loops and therapeutic transformation, it became impossible for me to separate my own therapeutic experiments from the theoretical frames I was developing.
In a sense, it is about sharing one’s own psychic journey to foreground the idea that this is not a book offering straightforward propositions about how to “break the loop,” but it is rather about entering an oscillatory movement between the loops we are trapped within, the loops we move away from, the loops we choose, and the loops we don’t. I also wanted to show the reader that the theoretical propositions of the book can have a deep impact on our personal lives. Affect theory, psychoanalysis, and anthropology have helped me get out more than one existential funk and I want to invite the reader to explore this possibility.
Q: Into the Loop draws upon systems theory, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, affect theory and media studies. How do you engage with these different frameworks in your book?
A: The only way I could answer this question would be to copy and paste the whole book here! Briefly, I could say that in the book I am driven by questions rather than disciplinary boundaries. I am not particularly interested in rehearsing a social science “critique” of psychotherapy or of the couple form. I am more excited about using all the conceptual tools I have at my disposal—from psychoanalysis to literature to cybernetic theories of the psyche to contemporary psychology—to fold the reader within the generative movements of a series questions. Like I write at the end of the book, “I wrote these pages indexing a constellation of missed encounters with what has been lost, I wrote to fill the voids in between us, I wrote to reach toward you with the fuzzy warmth of a question one asks just before falling asleep.”
Q: What are some examples of the ‘relational loops’ you explore in your book? How do certain psychosocial forces impact these ‘relational loops’?
A: Drawing from what the feminist theorist Teresa Brennan calls “affective dumping,” one of the loops I explore in the book is about how couples get stuck within an asymmetrical circulation of affective forces. One of these affective circuits, involves one partner recursively discharging “negative affects” onto the other partner, who acts as the go-to affective sponge of the couple. This is often a deeply gendered process, which means that bodies occupying the “masculine position” are the ones who tend to be allowed to continuously discharge their negative affects (like anger) onto bodies occupying the “feminine position.” The consequences of this dynamic, especially over a long period of time, can be extremely impactful. In the book, I analyze the importance of creating alternative affective circuits of discharge. It’s more complex than this, but this is one of the loops I describe and, being a gendered loop, it is run through and through by psycho-social forces that exceed individual subjectivities.
Q: In Chapter Three, you warn the reader that this chapter, titled, “Compulsive Repetitions”, will be “fastidiously obsessive.” How do the compulsive repetitions in the relationships you document in your book mirror your ongoing research into our modern-day compulsive attachments to our screens? What do you hope readers will discover about themselves and their own obsessive or compulsive repetitions?
A: In the book I explore in different ways how the romantic dyad can offer insights into understanding the user-screen dyad. One of the entry points into this, for example, is to consider the parallels between what we might understand as a toxic, if not abusive, relationship between partners and our relationship with the screen. In both cases, I suggest, the user/lover compulsively returns to their object of attachment in the name of a promise that is never fully delivered. Next time, my love, next time, I promise, it will be different. People recursively return to these relationships, even though they might be literally draining their vitality, also because they have deep identificatory attachments with the loop itself. We return to the screen, or our abusive lover, because, in a sense, we identify with the ways in which our partner (or screen) sees us. To let go of the loop might mean to let go of who (we think) we are. In the first chapter of the book, I explore in detail the detrimental impact of identifying with an abusive gaze (which is also a deeply racialized and gendered process). Screens or romantic partners—for me the ways in which these psychic circuits work is deeply entangled today. I end my chapter on the gaze and identificatory attachment with a rather clear proposition: “diffract abusive gazes, make them explode.”
Q: In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of couples therapy represented in reality docuseries such as Showtime’s "Couples Therapy" and Netflix’s 2026 British series, "Blue Therapy". How do these representations of couples therapy mirror the systemic couples therapy in your book? What dialogues are facilitated through these representations?
A: I don’t know! While writing the book in the past years, I decided not to look into these shows. I playfully embraced the idea that one needs to cultivate a certain degree of nonchalant ignorance to keep their writing fingers light and fresh. Now that the book is out, I can’t wait to finally watch them!
Q: What is the Scrolling Societies Lab, and how does it tie in with your current research project on the phenomenological experience of binge-scrolling on social media platforms?
A: The Scrolling Societies Lab (s/Lab) is a research space part of the Critical Media Lab at McGill. The driving idea of the s/Lab is to bring together colleagues from different disciplines as well as students to design and develop collective research projects addressing the psychic life (and impact) of algorithmic feeds. Among other things, between 2022 and 2025 we pursued a multi-modal research project where sixty college students (19-24 years old) allowed us to enter, explore, and get lost in their feed-worlds. Implementing a methodological sequence I call feed-analysis, we used a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods—from affective computing to free-associative interviews—to explore the ways in which algorithmic feeds have become sites for some sort of “extended psychic processing.” This means that we believe that in today’s scrolling society different psychic processes, such as dreaming, are being progressively “outsourced,” as it were. At the s/Lab we are experimenting with multi-modal and interdisciplinary methods to study this phenomenon.
Q: What’s next for you in 2026?
A: In 2026 I plan to finish the draft of my second book, tentatively titled Dreams I Scroll Through: A Psycho-Political Phenomenology of TikTok. The book is a performative re-arrangement of the data I collected at the s/Lab and it immerses the reader into a rather psychedelic ride following what I call the psychic movements of the feed. This year, I am also starting a new ethnographic project amidst different Daoist communities in Montreal and beyond. I am trying to understand what it means to shift the focus from brain-centric mindfulness approaches to more “visceral” practices that privilege the lower abdomen as the core energetic center of the human body … more on this soon!
Samuele Collu is an Assistant Professor of Medical and Psychological Anthropology at McGill University. His research examines the entanglement between psychic life, therapeutic practices, and digital devices. His first book, Into the Loop: An Ethnography of Compulsive Repetition, came out with Duke University Press this year (2026). He is currently completing Dreams I Scroll Through, an experimental ethnography immersing the reader in a social media binge-scroll.