Value Work: Depoliticization and Political Ambivalence in Contemporary Psychotherapy

• In Event: Sociology of Mental Healthcare

Abstract

Critics of “therapy culture” have long argued that therapeutic discourse depoliticizes social conflict by translating structural antagonisms into matters of subjectivity. Yet most debates have unfolded at the level of cultural analysis rather than clinical practice. Drawing on 51 in-depth interviews with licensed therapists across the United States, this study examines how clinicians navigate political content as it arises in everyday therapeutic encounters. I identify value work – the practice of translating political material into discussions of personal, moral, or existential values – as a key clinical mechanism through which depoliticization is accomplished. Across modalities such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Motivational Interviewing, and Existential Therapy, therapists reframe partisan conflict, policy disputes, and structural injustice as questions of authenticity, distress tolerance, meaning, and agency. This translation allows clinicians to anchor interventions in evidence-based models, maintain professional neutrality, preserve rapport in polarized contexts. At the same time, value work is politically ambivalent. While it can privatize structural conflict by relocating it to the interior self, it can also animate political agency, expand clients’ moral vocabularies, and subtly authorize advocacy-oriented practice grounded in therapists’ professional ethics. Rather than confirming a totalizing depoliticization thesis, the findings conceptualize therapy as a multifaceted ensemble in which political life is intertwined with clinical logics of neutrality, empowerment, and personal growth.

Author

• Elizabeth Harris, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor