ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Taming Psychotherapy: From Radical Experiment to Standards of Practice (1960-2000)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel brings together three approaches to psychotherapy that have their substantive origins in the 1960s and early 1970s across North America and Western Europe: feminist psychotherapy, encounter groups, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy. Despite their disparate origins and diverging philosophical underpinnings we contend that these therapeutic modalities share a common historical trajectory. In their earlier iterations they all had a sense of radical experimentalism that animated their practice and created a common purpose. Spurred by various social and economic developments from the 1970s onwards – including risk mitigation, the field’s professionalization, and the rise of evidence-based practice and validation – these experimental projects took on more standardized forms.
This panel will propose the metaphor of taming to describe the transformations that these clinical techniques and practitioners underwent as they came into the fold of institutionalized mental health care. By doing so, we hope to offer an alternative framing that goes beyond neoliberal critiques and the dominance of a Foucauldian analysis of “disciplining” within the historiography of the psy sciences.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Jill Morawski

Commentator

• Jill Morawski

Individual Presentations

• No pain, no gain? Countering encounter groups in the 1960s and 70s (Ulrich Koch, GWU) - Ulrich Koch, George Washington University

• From intergenerational radicalism to manualized treatments: CBT’s transformations from the 1960s to 2000s - Sarah Marks, Birkbeck, University of London

• Contested Therapeutics of Empowerment: Feminists and Psychotherapy - Stéphanie Pache, Université du Québec à Montréal

Session Organizers

• Ulrich Koch, George Washington University

• Sarah Marks, Birkbeck, University of London