ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contested Therapeutics of Empowerment: Feminists and Psychotherapy

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

English Abstract

With their slogan “the personal is political” and the practice of consciousness-raising groups, second-wave US feminists built an effective link between social change and personal change. These political practices resembled so much therapy that psychologists claimed them as such (Herman 1995). In this context, during the 1970s and 1980s, feminist therapists reshaped their practices to make them “feminist” (Pache 2015), even if this project has also been the object of a feminist critique considering it depoliticizing.
This paper examines a series of 1990s texts by feminist psychologists replying to each other and discussing the relevance and the political effect of feminist therapy. The publications of two preeminent feminist psychologists serve as the main empirical sources: the American therapist Laura S. Brown and her support to a politicized psychology and therapeutic tools (e.g. Brown, 1994, 2010); Celia Kitzinger, a British psychologist who accused feminist therapy of depoliticizing feminism and called for the rejection of psychology (e.g. Kitzinger, 1993; Kitzinger & Perkins, 1993). Brown and Kitzinger’s positions show how complex it is to disentangle the critique of therapy from a specific political point of view involving our conceptions of power relations and agency. They also illustrate some misunderstandings on the political role of psy disciplines. The examination of these intertwined issues will contribute to expose the specific characteristics of feminist therapy, i.e. its innovative and radical nature, but also the difficulties for many to imagine the radical potential of therapy in the now “neoliberal” context of the 1990s.

References
Brown, L. S. (1994). Subversive dialogues : Theory in feminist therapy. Basic Books.
Brown, L. S. (2010). Feminist therapy. American Psychological Association.
Herman, E. (1995). The Romance of American Psychology. University of California Press.
Kitzinger, C. (1993). Depoliticising the personal : A feminist slogan in feminist therapy. Women’s Studies International Forum, 16(5), 487‑496. https://doi.org/10.1016/0277-5395(93)90098-T
Kitzinger, C., & Perkins, R. (1993). Changing our minds : Lesbian feminism and psychology. Onlywomen Press.
Pache, S. (2015). Politiser la psychologie. Histoire d’une théorie féministe de la pratique psychothérapeutique (États-Unis, 1960-2015) [Université de Lausanne].

Author

• Stéphanie Pache, Université du Québec à Montréal