Clinical psychology/psychotherapy and cultural psychology, cultural adaptation of clinical practice, conceptual modeling in clinical psychology, cultural epistemologies of psychological suffering, qualitative and quantitative research in clinical contexts, history and theory of clinical concepts, cultural meaning processes in diagnosis and intervention.

My research examines how cultural meanings, subjective forms of experience and institutional contexts shape clinical practice and psychological suffering. Building on cultural-psychological and conceptual analyses, I examine how diagnostic and theoretical models reproduce cultural assumptions and thus contribute to biases. Simultaneously, I show how clinicians and users reinterpret and modify clinical concepts in everyday interactions, thereby producing alternative understandings of emotion, extremity, overload and therapeutic effectiveness.

In the last years, I have focused on developing and conceptually grounding models that explain how cultural meanings, institutional routines and concrete clinical encounters structure mental processes and clinical practice. Methodologically, I work primarily qualitatively and conceptually including in collaborative projects with clinicians and in the analysis of clinical and everyday narratives to reveal the negotiations, tensions and cultural expectations that shape psychological and psychotherapeutic work. Empirically, I focus on the cultural contexts of psychological suffering, extreme experiences and phenomena of overload, as well as their clinical implications, to develop culturally and psychologically informed models that make clinical practice theoretically sound and context-sensitive.

I am currently expanding this perspective in the project Extremes in Psychology, which investigates how “extremes” are defined culturally and subjectively and how such subjective attributions relate to supposedly objective indicators of extraordinary situations or behaviors. This project sheds light on how cultural narratives, media representations and individual experiences shape the perception of extremes and where transitions between extraordinary but normative experiences and clinically relevant deviations emerge.