Psychotherapy Theory Paper

Psychotherapy Theory Paper

Psychotherapy Theory Paper

Handbook for Social Justice in Counseling Psychology: Leadership,

Vision, and Action

Toward a Radical Feminist Multicultural Therapy: Renewing a Commitment to Activism

Contributors: Susan L. Morrow, Donna M. Hawxhurst, Ana Y. Montes de Vegas, Tamara M.

Abousleman & Carrie L. Castañeda

Edited by: Rebecca L. Toporek, Lawrence H. Gerstein, Nadya A. Fouad, Gargi Roysircar & Tania Israel

Book Title: Handbook for Social Justice in Counseling Psychology: Leadership, Vision, and

Action

Chapter Title: “Toward a Radical Feminist Multicultural Therapy: Renewing a Commitment to

Activism”

Pub. Date: 2006

Access Date: November 30, 2017

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9781412910071

Online ISBN: 9781412976220

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412976220.n17

Print pages: 231-248

©2006 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online version will vary from the pagination of the print book.

Toward a Radical Feminist Multicultural Therapy: Renewing a Commitment to Activism

Feminist counseling and psychotherapy, having emerged from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, would appear to be naturally situated in the social justice arena in counseling psychology. However, many of the qualities that characterized feminist therapy as it emerged from its grassroots origins (e.g., radical critique of mental health systems and psychotherapy, consciousness raising, political analysis and activism, and commitment to social transformation as integral to work with clients) have faded into the background as feminist therapy has become more mainstreamed and feminist therapists have focused increasingly on individual solutions to human problems (Marecek & Kravatz, 1998b? Morrow & Hawxhurst, 1998).

In addition, for a significant period in the herstory of feminist therapy, multicultural perspectives were included unevenly and have been centralized only recently in an integrative feminist multicultural therapeutic approach (Bowman & King, 2003? Bowman et al., 2001? Brown, 1994? Comas-Díaz, 1994? Espín, 1994? Israel, 2003? Landrine, 1995). This chapter will review the evolution of feminist multicultural psychotherapy, identify theoretical underpinnings for its ongoing development, and propose a social justice agenda for feminist multicultural therapy in counseling psychology. In addition, we provide two examples from our work as feminist multicultural counselors for social justice.

Herstory and Evolution of Feminist Multicultural Counseling

Feminist and multicultural counseling perspectives emerged from the social and political unrest of the 1960s. As disenfranchised groups began pressing for social change, counselors and other mental health professionals found themselves stranded without the tools to address cultural differences and oppression (Atkinson & Hackett, 2004). Feminist and multicultural scholars and practitioners began to criticize traditional therapies for their racist and sexist underpinnings.

Mainstream psychology, particularly through the diagnostic process, pathologized women, people of color, and others for qualities and behaviors that were outside of the White, male, heterosexual norm. In addition, “symptoms” arising from victimization (e.g., battered women’s syndrome? anger or fear responses to racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc.) were often labeled as personality defects (e.g., borderline personality disorder, paranoia) instead of being understood in the context of trauma theory as a reasonable consequence of intolerable and oppressive circumstances.

Another criticism of traditional therapies was their exclusively intrapsychic focus (McLellan, 1999). McLellan also argued that traditional therapies assume that all people have equal access to choice and power and that each individual is responsible for her or his own life circumstances and unhappiness, failing to recognize the ways in which oppression limits choice and power. Psychotherapy Theory Paper.

The impetus for multicultural counseling came from increasing attention to cross-cultural counseling and cultural diversity emerging from ethnic and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1973 American Psychological Association (APA) sponsored conference on clinical psychology in Vail, Colorado, was an important turning point for the profession of psychology when it was declared unethical to provide counseling services if the provider lacked the appropriate cultural competence to do so (Korman, 1974). Multiculturalism in psychology and counseling was not easily accepted in the field given the predominantly intrapsychic focus and the view that human distress was primarily psychophysiologic in nature. In response to this resistance, Smith and Vasquez (1985), in their introduction to a

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Handbook for Social Justice in Counseling Psychology: Leadership, Vision, and Action

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special issue of The Counseling Psychologist on cross-cultural counseling, wrote the following:

We believe that the doctrine of color blindness in mental health and counseling psychology has outlived its usefulness. Therapists are not color-blind. Culture is a major factor in the life development of individuals, and ethnicity is a major form of identity formation and group identification. (p. 532)

Over the years, the multicultural competency (MCC) literature has focused on five major themes: “(a) asserting the importance of MCC? (b) characteristics, features, dimensions, and parameters of MCC? (c) MCC training and supervision? (d) assessing MCC? and (e) specialized applications of MCC” (Ridley & Kleiner, 2003, p. 5). Early training in multicultural counseling stressed the importance of knowledge, awareness, and skills in working with diverse populations? this trifold objective remains central in the training literature today.

The multicultural counseling literature has moved from a focus on merely appreciating and celebrating diversity (as important a beginning as this was) to an insistence on examining the underpinnings of privilege, power, and oppression, particularly as they relate to groups of people who have been marginalized (Liu & Pope-Davis, 2003). The recent adoption by the APA (2002) of Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists was a stunning victory for the profession and provided psychologists with aspirational goals to guide their work with ethnic minority individuals. Psychotherapy Theory Paper.

Feminist therapy grew out of political activism in the United States in the 1970s and was conceived of as a political act in and of itself (Mander & Rush, 1974). From its inception, feminist therapy was a response to feminist critiques of traditional therapy practices that were identified as harmful to women (Chesler, 1997). Its goals were twofold: to engage women in a process of political analysis geared to raising their awareness of how interpersonal and societal power dynamics affect their well-being, and to mobilize women to change the social structures contributing to these harmful power dynamics (Ballou & Gabalac, 1985).

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The first decade of feminist therapy was characterized by “a critical examination of mental- health services to women, feminist consciousness-raising groups as an alternative to psychotherapy, an activist and grassroots orientation to therapy for women, an emphasis on groups as opposed to individual psychotherapy, and assertiveness training” (Morrow & Hawxhurst, 1998, p. 38). In the second decade, feminist therapists worked to further define feminist therapy by identifying and describing its goals, its processes, and the skills needed to practice it (Enns, 1993). Books and articles about feminist therapy proliferated during this time, as did critiques from within and outside the discipline (Morrow & Hawxhurst, 1998).

As feminist psychotherapy became increasingly mainstreamed and professionalized, radical feminist writers such as Kitzinger and Perkins (1993) sounded the alarm that feminist therapy —along with therapy in general—served a domesticating, depoliticizing function. Instead of the “personal being political,” the political was being inexorably whittled away until it was once again privatized, individualized, and personal. In a special issue of Women and Therapy (1998) on “Feminist Therapy as a Political Act,” researchers and practitioners addressed this problem in a number of ways. Hill and Ballou (1998) found that feminist therapists addressed power issues in the client-counselor relationship and helped clients examine oppression and the sociocultural causes of distress? in addition, some therapists actively worked for social change by advocating for their clients and teaching clients to advocate for themselves. However, Marecek and Kravatz (1998a, 1998b) found very little in their study of feminist

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Handbook for Social Justice in Counseling Psychology: Leadership, Vision, and Action therapists that distinguished the therapists as uniquely feminist. Most of the characteristics espoused…

Psychotherapy Theory Paper