FEMINIST THERAPY Laura S

Chapter 9 FEMINIST THERAPY Laura S. Brown Feminist therapy sprang into existence at the end of the 1960s as a form of protest against sexism in the mental health professions. In the nearly 40 years since therapists began to use the term feminist to describe themselves and their work, the theory has evolved signifi cantly from its roots into a sophisticated integrative model of psychotherapy practice. Nonetheless, what remains true about feminist practice as much today as 30 years ago is its attention to the dynamics of power both inside and outside of the therapy offi ce. A close and careful analysis of the meanings of gender and other social locations in our clients’ lives as well as in the distress that brings them into therapy is also important. This chapter constitutes a broad overview of feminist therapy theory, tracing its evolution from “not business as usual” to its current status. Feminist therapy can be defi ned as: The practice of therapy informed by feminist political philosophies and analysis, grounded in multicultural feminist scholarship on the psychology of women and gender, which leads both therapist and client toward strategies and solutions advancing feminist resistance, transfor- mation and social change in daily personal life, and in relationships with the social, emo- tional and political environments. (Brown, 1994 , pp. 21–22) The project of feminist therapy is one of subversion (Brown, 2004 , 2005 ), the under- mining of internalized and external patriarchal realities that serve as a source of distress and as a brake on growth and personal power. Psychotherapy is itself construed as a potential component of the system of oppression, with therapy as usual practiced in ways that can uphold problematic status quos. Patriarchies, the social systems in which attributes associated with maleness are privi- leged and those attributed to women are denigrated (Lerner, 1993 ), no matter in whom they appear, are identifi ed as the problem in feminist therapy, rather than the actual distress or dysfunction about which the client initiates therapy. Therapy is thus considered to have political meaning in the larger social sphere because it has the potential to undermine such systems as they are represented in the intrapsychic and behavioral/ interpersonal lives of humans. Unlike many other approaches to therapy, feminist therapy’s origins lie in several political movements that are all subsumed under the rubric of feminism. It situates within criti- cal psychology (Fox & Prilleltensky, 1997 ), which includes theories, such as liberation psychology (Martin-Baro, 1986 , 1994 ), multicultural psychology (Comas-Diaz, 2000 ), Copyright © 2008. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2008. John Wiley Copyright and narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990 ). All of these theories stand at the margins of mainstream psychology and critique its assumptions about health, distress, normalcy, and the nature of the therapist-client relationship. The particular strain of feminist therapy Lebow, J. L., & LeBow (2008). Twenty-first century psychotherapies : Contemporary approaches to theory and practice. ProQuest Ebook Central <a 277 onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from umn on 2020-09-19 15:23:28. c09.indd 277 10/24/07 5:13:47 PM 278 Twenty-First Century Psychotherapies to which I refer here is most infl uenced by feminist psychology, although feminist therapists are also found in the fi elds of psychiatry, social work, and counseling. Because of its name, feminist therapy is frequently thought to be both by and for women only. Indeed, almost every initial adherent to this model was a woman, and the early years of feminist therapy are marked by an attention to women’s special needs in psychotherapy. Today this is not the case, and feminist therapy is practiced by people of all genders, with every possible type and confi guration of client (Brown, 2005 ; Levant & Silverstein, 2005 ). Feminist therapy, unlike many other theories of therapy, does not have a founding parent. It is a paradigm that developed from the grassroots of practice, and its beginnings occurred in the context of many people’s experiences and interactions, all of which have combined to create consensus models of feminist practice, as well as some distinct schools of feminist practice. HISTORY OF FEMINIST THERAPY: INITIAL STIRRINGS Feminist therapy can trace its conceptual origins to three founding documents, two of which were explicitly feminist, one of which was situated in psychology’s main stream: (1) Chesler’s Women and Madness ( 1972 ), (2) Weisstein’s Kinder Kuche Kirche as Scientifi c Law: Psychology Constructs the Female ( 1970), and (3) Broverman, Broverman, Clarkson, Rosenkrantz, and Vogel’s Sex Role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgment of Mental Health (1970 ). All of these texts are discussed in detail later. Each presaged developments to follow, and each functioned to effect the fi rst step in any process of feminist therapy— the arousal of feminist consciousness. Feminist consciousness, as defi ned by historian Gerda Lerner (1993 ), is the development of awareness that a person’s maltreatment is not due to individual defi cits, but to membership in a group that has been unfairly subordi- nated; and that society can and should be changed to give equal power and value to all. For the early feminist therapists, the development of feminist consciousness arose from their own experiences as therapists and sometimes clients within the patriarchal system of psychotherapy as practiced universally prior to the early 1970s. Feminist psychologists and therapists, like many women of that era, participated in consciousness-raising groups as part of the second-wave women’s liberation movement that occurred in the United States in the late 1960s. In those groups, women met together without a leader and shared personal experiences of their lives, including experiences of discrimination. For feminist psychologists, a signifi cant portion of those experiences of sexism had occurred in profes- sional and educational settings (Chesler, Rothblum, & Cole, 1995 ), and those experiences were the genesis of two of feminist therapy’s founding documents. Phyllis Chesler, trained as a research psychologist in the mid-1960s, authored Women and Madness (Chesler, 1972 ) as a protest against what she saw as unjust and sometimes inhumane conditions for women in psychotherapy. In a personal memoir (Chesler, 1995 ), she describes returning home from the 1969 convention of the American Psychological Association, at which a feminist protest had occurred, feeling compelled to use her skills as a researcher to document empirically how psychotherapy oppressed women. She used early tools of feminist analysis to argue that in psychotherapy, the conditions of a sex- ist and oppressive society were replicated for women. Most psychotherapists of the time were male and most, in the middle 1960s, were trained either in the rigid psychoanalytic orthodoxy of the day that implicitly denigrated women via its interpretation of psycho- Copyright © 2008. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2008. John Wiley Copyright analytic theory, or were proponents of a version of humanistic psychotherapies that, while more open and accepting of women’s experiences, were also often lacking in boundaries for sexual contact between therapist and client. Most clients were women, frequently Lebow, J. L., & LeBow (2008). Twenty-first century psychotherapies : Contemporary approaches to theory and practice. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from umn on 2020-09-19 15:23:28. c09.indd 278 10/24/07 5:13:48 PM Feminist Therapy 279 struggling to make sense of confl icts between pursuing their goals, desires, and interests and societal demands that White, middle-class, educated women work as unpaid home- makers and full-time parents. Chesler noted that in this confi guration women were defi ned as neurotic and disturbed simply because of desires to work in professions or not parent full-time. The client, she wrote, was a wife or daughter in therapy with the man who assumed the complementary role. She was also the fi rst author to document the problem of sexual boundary violations in therapy and to compare such violations to other forms of sexual assault. Although in the twenty-fi rst century therapists take for granted the prohibitions on sexual contact with clients, Chesler’s work occurred in an era when several famous therapists and founding fathers of humanistic approaches were publicly fl aunting their sexual relationships with their clients (with one of them rising in a public forum at a psychotherapy conference in 1982, in the presence of this writer, to state that it was good for women’s self-esteem to “seduce” their powerful older male therapist), and when women’s reports of any form of sexual violation were routinely dismissed as fantasy productions, or attributed to the woman’s own misconduct. All of these arguments rendered Chesler’s work revolutionary and controversial when it was published. Her willingness to state that psychotherapy as usual could be harm- ful to women because of its replication of oppression was itself consciousness raising to many of her readers. Her exposure of the problem of sexual misconduct was the cata- lyst for changes to ethics codes so that such behaviors would be explicitly proscribed. Her insights into what needed to happen in psychotherapy to render it both nonharmful to women, and potentially contributory to feminist social change, laid the groundwork for what was to follow. The second founding document of feminist therapy, also arising in an explicitly feminist context, and also written by a psychologist, was Naomi Weisstein’s Kinder Kuche, Kirche as Scientifi c Law: Psychology Constructs the Female ( 1970 ).

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