Liberation psychologists, feminists, and others on the margins of the psy-disciplines have long understood that one of the main problems of psy-treatment is that it takes people out of their worldly contexts—social, political, economic, etc.
A new paper published in Women & Therapy – by Mad in America writer and psychologist Zenobia Morrill and multicultural psychologist Lillian Comas-Díaz – puts forward a model of psychotherapy that re-centers sociopolitical issues for clients and aims to subvert the abuse of power too often baked into psychotherapy.
“The liberation psychotherapy presented here aims to empower clients’ exploration of their lived experience, a collaborative process seen as the wellspring that informs self, other, and collective liberation. One risk of psychotherapy is that it may function as an instrument of oppression, to promote clients’ adjustment to an unjust status quo,” Morrill and Comas-Díaz write.
For instance, when clients’ problems are decontextualized and located exclusively within individuals as disorder or dysfunction, the influence of inequity and social determinants of health go obscured, and in-session practices risk myopically focusing on adapting clients’ thoughts, feelings, or behaviors to a narrow norm that represents a global minority.”
Psychotherapy has long been criticized for its focus on individual adjustment, often ignoring the sociopolitical and economic contexts that shape human experiences. But the approach the authors propose, rooted in feminist and liberation psychology, seeks to upend the power dynamics in psychotherapy and recontextualize client struggles within broader systems of oppression.
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I’m going to lance it and take your head off, see. How can you say you do anything when your doing is the end result of a causal chain that extends back to the beginning of time and includes the entire Universe from the big bang to the movement of your hand right now? So only this one total process produced anything, only the anything it produced was not any one thing but everything, which is to say these many one things at exactly the same time. And you are the exploding Universe coming to know itself as a part of this exploding Universe, but if you think you are the part, you’ll never understand the whole which you actually are. And nothing else is real, because nothing IS real. (‘But still there are rules to follow’). No thing is real – only nothing itself is real, and that nothing is everything.
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Gee, No-One, it seems you can somewhat comprehend how my bizarre dream nicknames, might have allowed me to get “Everyone Else,” with “love and the word of God”? Who knows? But my bizarre dreams make logical sense to me. However, I can also understand why most people’s dreams seem bizarre, and illogical, to them.
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If this were a sane and just world, an academic psychologist would be coming to me, the real psychologist, saying “I’m interested in integrating feminist and liberation psychology into therapy.” I would explain that if liberation has any meaning whatsoever, it does not include swatting with a load of books in order to earn the right to voice a load of socially conditioned verbal formulations called ‘theories’, i.e. opinions, that are delusional enough to believe they might have something to do with REAL human liberation. No – you are just sharpening up a load of thought tools and thought divices which want to penetrate a field they can never understand, because thought is the essence of unfreedom. It’s the enslavement of the mind through social conditioning by a diseased society, the slayer of our native and natural instinctual freedom. So no intellectual discussion can free you from anything. It is the only enslavement we know, and it enslaves and destroys everything it touches. The proof is in the pudding, and you are also the pudding, not just the world outside of you which is the greater pudding that you still are.
I’m sorry – a host of evil entities have hijacked and are joy riding the brain. So says the evil entities who have hijacked and are joy riding the brain – believe them at your peril.
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When I saw the title of this article, I immediately thought of Herbert Marcuse’s attempt to meld Freudianism (a misogynistic doctrine colored by Victorian-era prejudice) and Marxism (a linear vision of human progress that arrogated to itself the status of “scientific” socialism in contrast to the “utopian” socialism of the early nineteenth century) into a comprehensive critique of capitalism back in the 1960s. How did that incompatible mixture work out?
This misguided attempt to re-validate therapy by incorporating elements of feminist and liberation psychology into it also lacks a solid empirical basis, since there can be no such thing as psychotherapy in a strictly medical or scientific sense. Moreover, what kind of therapy does the author have in mind? Certainly not Freudianism, and most likely not Janov’s Primal Therapy, which considers homosexuality a form of mental illness. That would definitely be anathema to LBGTQ champions of feminism and liberation ideology. If the author wants to incorporate all these disparate ideological and psychological trends into a coherent, meaningful, and effective whole, she first needs to demonstrate the scientific credibility of psychotherapy per se. Otherwise, the whole endeavor will be just another futile elitist intellectual exercise with little or no relevance to ordinary people in emotional distress.
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So just to check, since in other articles you’ve cited Szasz, you’re a scientologist right? Everything you post seems very scientologist, including your definition of what is scientifically credible.
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A) Szaz was not a Scientologist. He just worked with them.
B) If he is, why does that matter to you, Marcus? Why not judge a person by their evidence rather than bringing in irrelevant points like religion? A person’s argument for or against abortion, for instance, should be considered independently of whether they are Catholic, don’t you think?
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In response to your gratuitous ad hominem insinuation, I certainly do not espouse scientology, which I regard as a pseudo-religious
cult–just as I consider the entire mental health industry to be a cult-like movement that aspires to be a legitimate branch of medical science but is essentially a hodgepodge of fanciful unproven hypotheses, which are constantly added (or less often deleted) from the ever-expanding DSM compendium of arbitrarily concocted disorders in accordance with changing social and cultural trends, not on the basis of verifiable findings obtained through rigorous, extensive, worldwide testing and experimentation under controlled laboratory conditions.
Lastly, I also greatly admire the work of Phil Hickey, Jeffrey Schaler, Peter Goetze, Bruce E. Levine, and Joanna Moncrieff, none of whom, to the best of my knowledge, are scientologists. And even if they were, that would not necessarily detract from the substantive merits of their arguments–just as the fact that some scientologists cite Thomas Szasz does not automatically invalidate his critique of psychiatry as a “science of lies.”
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I’ve already explained on this website what elementary criteria a given discipline should meet in order to be considered scientifically credible. What is your own notion of this concept, and do psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and other fields associated with the mental health industry fulfill these basic criteria? If you believe they do, please explain why it should be regarded as a legitimate, full-fledged branch of medicine.
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Oh yes. What value has this news or any news when nothing in our life is actually real except for the long forgotten people we are buried underneath the functional artifice we call ‘ourselves’ and ‘real life’? Nothing is real – “but still there are rules to follow”, and if you trace back the evolution of these rules it was born in authority, brutality, domination, the human disease that flowered and destroyed the Earth. So the surprise fed interest rate decision and Kamala Harris’ poll numbers are not the real story, obviously. And no-body writes the real story. It just happens because everything just happens. How can you say you or anyone else do anything when yours and everyone else’s doing is the end result of a causal chain that extends back to the beginning of time and includes the entire Universe from the big bang to what you and everyone else are right now? This big bang is the only doer, but who did it? At the end of the day it has to be nothing. And nothing else is real, because nothing IS real. (‘But still there are rules to follow’). No thing is real – only nothing itself is real, and that nothing moves everything. That nothing contains all things which happen within it but which it cannot touch – it can only see. You are that unreachable nothing and that unreachable something, the proof of the miracle of the two and the proof of it’s illusion.
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Quit the wordy bullshit: liberation psychology, existentialist, social determinants of mental health, blah, blah, blah.
Better to find kindly souls who get who you are and where you’re at than having to pay some fool’s financially oppressive fees while kissing their power-imbalanced ass.
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Birdsong, I like your way with words! You really know how to deflate overblown egos and puffed up prose! In just two sentences you tore down the outwardly impressive facade (prestigious credentials, media hype, institutional backing) but inwardly corrupt and intellectually shoddy core (Big Pharma financing, spurious DSM categories and stigmatizing labels, brain-disabling treatments) of the pernicious psychotherapy cult/racket masquerading as a legitimate branch of medicine.
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I like your words, too Joel ☺️.
All I can say is getting fed up with academic pomposity at times has its advantages…
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