Feminist Practice in the Absence of the Capacity for Empathy

For the very small number of individuals who, for unknown reasons, lack all capacity for empathy and experience pleasure and arousal in response to the pain of others, feminist therapy would not be applicable. Feminist principles about power and gender could inform psychotherapy with such individuals, in that the therapist would be aware of the effects of power and gender dynamics in the exchange with such an individual and might have hypotheses as to how violent patriarchal cultures would serve as a breeding ground for sociopathy. However, a model stressing relationship and empowerment would be incongruent with the realities of a person whose primary interest is in overpowering others so as to control or harm them.

A feminist-informed therapist working with such a client might, for instance, use her awareness of how he is applying norms of heterosexual gender relationships in an attempt to reframe the relationship as a romantic one and explore her vulnerability arising from her own gender schemata to disempowerment in that realm; this would ultimately allow her to be more alert and attentive to the client’s attempts to undermine the therapy process. Salter (2004) provides an informative snapshot of how a feminist-informed psychotherapist works with this group of people while maintaining her own personal power and her own stance of refusing to enable people who are gratified by the use of violence against others.

DIVERSITY AND FEMINIST THERAPY

Feminist therapy is, as noted throughout this volume, an intentionally multicultural and increasingly global approach to therapy. The last two decades of feminist therapy theory and practice have been marked by an increasing attention to issues of other social locations such as ethnicity, culture, social class, sexual orientation, disability and ability, and the meanings of indigenous status, histories of colonization, and experiences of emigration and dislocation. All of the epistemologies of feminist therapy generate a deepened capacity for responding to the needs of diverse individuals. In the feminist frame, all human beings have each of these aspects of their identity; thus, the feminist epistemology of diversity is not of the privileged person working with the “other,” but of one individual with a particular admixture of social locations, power, privilege, internalized oppression, and disadvantage working with another. Because the norm of an egalitarian relationship calls on the feminist therapist to consciously own and acknowledge imbalance in power between herself or himself and the client, the therapist will bring that analysis of power to the psychotherapeutic process, making her or his practice more culturally competent.

Imagine two women. One is an African American feminist therapist who is partnered and a lesbian. The other is an Asian American client who is heterosexual and single. Each is deeply engaged with her religious faith, both are mothers, and each has a profession that requires earning a graduate degree. The therapist, as a feminist, will notice and consider what it means for her client that she is a member of another ethnic group of color, but one that has been used in favorable comparison for the client’s own group (e.g., the “model minority” stereotype of Asian American and the “badness of blackness” stereotype of African Americans). The therapist will also consider the ways in which her privileged status (partnered) and her client’s privileged status (heterosexual) affect the balances of power. Even if none of this is spoken in the room, the therapist’s acute awareness of these lines of power and privilege weaving the form of the therapy relationship will likely enhance her capacity to understand how the client’s social locations and multiple identities affect her distress and dysfunction as well as her strengths and capacities. Feminist therapy’s epistemologies of difference, in which a person is encountered as a whole and integrated fabric composed of all identity threads rather than as disconnected boxes of identity parts, will draw the therapist to honor and make explicit any symbolic meanings of their differences in power and privilege as they emerge in their work together, rather than treating those differences as immaterial because they are both professionals, mothers, Christians, and women of color.

WOMANIST AND MUJERISTA MODELS

Some feminist therapists have purposefully integrated feminist and multicultural epistemologies, creating womanist paradigms. For example, Lillian Comas-Díaz (2006, 2008) illustrates the integration of feminist and multicultural principles in her work with Latino/a clients, providing an excellent example of how feminist therapy points its practitioners toward cultural competence. She notes that in working with clients from a particular heritage (in her example, those from Central and South America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean), a therapist must pay attention to the worldviews held by clients from that heritage and culture, particularly to the integration of spirituality and its symbols into people’s lives. Such worldviews may be expressed through spiritual traditions, use of language, social arrangements, rituals and celebrations, food, art, and important sayings or proverbs. She argues that to effectively empower clients, therapists must actively embrace these wide-ranging aspects of our clients’ phenomenologies. A feminist therapist may share a ritual meal, attend a healing event, or in other ways engage with the important empowering location in the client’s culture. She also notes the importance, for cultural competence, of knowing and understanding how histories of oppression and exclusion have shaped worldviews and give meaning to current experiences. Because of feminist therapy’s acute attention to just this sort of information, its practice serves as a starting point for cultural competence.

This perspective is similar to that expressed by Beverly Greene (1990, 1992, 2000; Hall & Greene, 2003) in her work on feminist therapy with African American women. Greene discusses the importance of attending to the meaning of womanhood in African American communities in the context of the history of slavery and racism. She notes that for these women, sources of resilience can also be sources of distress due to the extreme and conflicting demands placed on them by the intersection of racism and sexism and the particularly gendered forms of racism, and raced forms of sexism, encountered by women of color. Greene’s work epitomizes feminist therapy’s focus on the effects of people’s intersecting and multiple identities, another core component of cultural competence for psychotherapists.

As one of the critical psychologies, feminist psychology, and thus feminist psychotherapies, is grounded in liberatory models of understanding human difference. Whether the person seeking therapy is a Euro American, heterosexual, able-bodied young man or an aging Latina lesbian with cancer, feminist therapy emphasizes analyzing the meaning of power and privilege in each person’s life and its placement of that life into the larger social and political context as a strategy for understanding both distress and good function. It is no wonder, then, that feminist therapists are a diverse range of human beings well prepared to be effective with that scope of human diversity.

Future Developments

As a very young school, feminist therapy’s future is likely to include developments mirroring the progress of other theories with longer histories. But because feminist therapy is grounded in feminist political theories and philosophies that are continuously expanding their reach, it is equally probable that some developments in feminist therapy will be unique to its critical, political stance. Many of the challenges confronting feminist therapy’s future are not new, as they reflect the continuing struggles of an antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, grassroots model to somehow balance that unique perspective with cultural demands for conformity, predictability, and certification of therapists. Other challenges reflect the inherent political stance of feminist practice and its responsiveness to social realities and politics of power and privilege as a liberatory strategy within patriarchal contexts.

ORGANIZATIONAL AND CREDENTIALING CONCERNS

One of the challenges inherent in being an antihierarchical egalitarian theory with no founders is that it has been difficult, in these first four decades, to have a central organization, membership in which would confer official status as a feminist therapist. The Feminist Therapy Institute (FTI) has remained small in numbers, as was originally planned; the Jean Baker Miller Institute of the Stone Center, which has always been the training site for the relational–cultural (RC) arm of feminist therapy, offers annual workshops and meetings, and trains people in RC therapy, but there has been no similar long-lasting training institute for other schools of feminist therapies. Many feminist therapists are unaffiliated with either organization, there has been no method of quality control, and there are few ways of ensuring consistency of practice among self-identified feminist therapists. Remarkably, in the midst of this apparent absence of cohesion, the written record of feminist therapy, at least, indicates quite a good deal of consistency. In the first decade of the 21st century, as at its inception in the late 1960s, when feminist therapists come together in person or by reading one another’s work, the theory of feminist therapy continues to be visible and relatively consistent across authors and conferences. Even with no one to enforce standards and practices or to officially define a person’s status, feminist therapists appear to be acting autonomously and as a loose collective, creating the growth and practice of the discipline.

Although there is no central figure to whom all can trace back their analysis, as was true for the first generation of psychoanalytic theorists and therapists, a parallel can be drawn between the state of affairs extant during the early decades of psychoanalysis and feminist therapy’s current state. Almost all of the founders and first theorists, and many of the very early self-identified practitioners, of feminist therapy are still alive and responsible for much of the writing, teaching, and training about feminist therapy that exists today. Thus, the apparent cohesion most likely reflects the enduring, and still quite personal, influence of the first wave of thinkers in feminist therapy; for example, all of the commercially available training videos in feminist practice feature therapists who were founders of the FTI and present at its first meeting. Although some important members of that first generation have died (most notably, in the field of feminist therapy, Adrienne Smith, one of the founders of FTI), their work continues to have influence via their peers and colleagues who are still active in shaping the field.

This state of affairs is changing as that first cohort ages, retires, and dies. Consequently, one necessary future development for this antiauthoritarian model will likely be the creation of some kind of boundary-maintaining mechanisms for feminist practice. This may come in the form of a credentialing organization such as now exists for eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, which requires a certain number of hours of training and supervised practice with continuing education to retain certification, or via the recognition of feminist therapy as a specialty in psychology, a task which has been in progress since the late 1990s through the auspices of the Society for the Psychology of Women under the leadership of Roberta Nutt and Pamela Remer. (Readers wishing updates on the progress of obtaining recognition of feminist practice as a specialty by the American Psychological Association are encouraged to read The Feminist Psychologist, the newsletter of the Society for the Psychology of Women [SPW]; information about TFP can be found at http://www.apadivisions.org/division-35/publications/newsletters/feminist-psychologist/). The FTI, whose ethics codes have been recognized as consensus documents by many feminist therapists, but which are intentionally aspirational, rather than enforceable, standards, might expand and take on a larger role than has been its heritage. Until now, its influence on the field has largely been through the sponsorship of documents like the FTI Code of Ethics and several influential books on feminist therapy theory and ethics arising from its annual meetings (Ballou, Hill, & West, 2008; Hill & Ballou, 2005; Lerman & Porter, 1990; Rave & Larsen, 1995; Rosewater & Walker, 1985). Updates on conferences and publications by FTI and its members can be found at http://feminist-therapy-institute.org.

Many feminist therapists have expressed the desire for a training institute that would offer coursework in feminist practice both at the graduate and post-degree levels so that, similar to the Jean Baker Miller Institute, therapists pursuing training in feminist practice would have access to programming of predictable substance and quality. SPW made an attempt at creating such a program of continuing education in the late 1990s, but it was not successful due to lack of enrollment (or perhaps poor planning on the part of this author, who was the organizer of the program). This lacuna is one of the longest-running problems in feminist therapy, commented on by this author in her 1994 discussion of feminist therapy’s future. Currently, when training in feminist practice is available, it occurs on a sporadic and nonsystematic basis, through brief continuing education workshops, either at conferences or as stand-alones, or via a course offered in a graduate program by a feminist faculty member. However, it seems that the creation of such an institute, whether it be one that exists in a physical space or some kind of organized program of education available through a centralized organization that recruits and screens teachers and develops curriculum that is then taught either in person or online, appears to be part of feminist therapy’s future.

FEMINIST THERAPY AS AN INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY

Feminist therapy’s future will also include its growing integration into the ranks of major models of technically integrated practice. As noted here, feminist scholars have not always found a warm welcome in academia, and some texts about psychotherapy and counseling still give the topic short shrift. Yet some influential and frequently used introductory graduate texts in psychotherapy, such as those by Snyder and Ingram (2005), Prochaska and Norcross (2003), and Corey (2005), have begun to include significant mention of feminist therapy. As the framework of empirically supported psychotherapy relationships is more applied to evaluation of the outcomes of feminist practice, the capacity of an empowerment stance to integrate well into a number of theories will likely lead to deeper developments of some of these integrations. Just as today, cognitive and psychodynamic therapies have several different integrative blends, so in the future feminist therapy’s intersections with other models will become more distinctive.

EFFECTS OF CHANGING POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXTS

Changes in the social and political context will also affect how feminist therapy develops both in the near and longer-term futures. In the United States, as this monograph was being written, the newly elected President Barack Obama has proposed a program of national health care that is likely to include coverage for mental health care given recent votes in Congress to require parity in insurance coverage for mental health conditions. How feminist therapists will or will not be included in that process should health care reform become a reality is unknowable. The examples of Canadian feminist therapists are instructive; mental health care with psychiatrists is covered in the Canadian system of national health, but not psychotherapy with psychologists, social workers, or counselors. In Canada, many nonpsychiatric feminist therapists work in feminist-themed government agencies or in feminist projects that are largely government-funded, but are not offering the sort of psychotherapy largely practiced by their U.S. counterparts (Susan Armstrong, personal communication, December 2, 2007).

Whether feminist therapists in the United States will be included in any national health plan and whether they, or any currently self-employed psychotherapists, will be able to continue practice as usual is impossible to predict. Since many of the empowerment strategies proposed by feminist therapists until now have reflected the location of many U.S. feminist practitioners in the self-employed sphere, if this social context changes or is removed, then feminist therapy will take on new lineaments as it strives to meet its superordinate goals of the empowerment of clients and the creation of feminist consciousness.

Although the trend in U.S. society for the past several decades has been toward less overt, more aversive forms of bias (Dovidio, 2001), events reported in the media in the first decade of this century suggest that overt expression of bias and bias crimes may be on the rise. Rates of sexual assault have not gone down over time, while resources for assisting the victims of this gendered bias crime have diminished along with other funding for victims of violence. Because all of these worrisome social trends are germane to the analysis of feminist therapy, one possible direction in which feminist practice may go in the future is back to its roots, exploring with today’s insights and scholarship some of the strategies that feminist psychologists and psychotherapists developed in the very overtly biased political and social realities of the 1960s and 1970s.

FEMINIST THERAPY’S NEXT GENERATIONS

Feminism continues to change, and as it changes, feminist therapy will reflect those transformations. The current Fourth Wave of U.S. feminists are increasingly global in their awareness and more then ever attentive to matters of social location; as a result, they challenge even more deeply essentialist remnants of earlier constructions of feminism. This new wave is the crucible for the creation of a new generation of feminist therapists for whom many of the categories important to current feminist analysis are less relevant. These feminists operate from a postmodern analysis in many instances, where all social constructs are interrogated and assumed to be mutable. An increasing embrace of people who are transgendered within feminism and the emergence of a growing number of trans-identified feminist therapists are examples of this most recent trend. During the essentialist era of mid-1980s feminisms, the phenomenon of transgender was attacked by some feminist thinkers as a strategy for placing men (persons with a Y chromosome) into the ranks of “real women” (persons born with no Y chromosome) so as to undermine their solidarity (Raymond, 1979). Some large social gatherings of women, such as the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, continue to advertise themselves as being for “women-born-women” only, excluding both transwomen (born male) and transmen (born female), indicating that this trope of essentialist construction of sex and gender still dominates some corners of the women’s movement.

However, for growing numbers of the younger generation of feminists, who were raised with the notion that gender is simply a social construct, arguments about essential femaleness or maleness are greeted with skepticism. Transmen who are feminist therapists are now actively involved in the Association for Women in Psychology, for instance. This radical subversion of cultural norms of sex and gender, including those upheld by the older generation of feminist therapists, may herald things to come in feminist therapy theorizing. If sex is no longer seen as any more essential than gender, but rather as a phenomenology related to a somatic state that is subject to modification both biologically and legally, theory in feminist therapy will be required to change in order to encompass this new way of understanding one of its most basic precepts.

SELF-OBJECTIFICATION THEORY: A MODEL OF INTERNALIZED AVERSIVE OPPRESSION

Younger generation feminist therapists (those currently under age 35) are also taking leadership in developing models of understanding gender identity and identity development. Self-objectification theory (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), which has largely grown out of work studying women’s experiences of disordered eating and distorted body image, offers a new feminist model for understanding identity development in the sexist patriarchies of the 21st century. This theory posits that people internalize the ways in which they are objectified (by sex, phenotype, and so on), including both supposedly positive images associated with group membership, such as attractiveness, which creates a critical and sexist inner observer, and then self-critique based on success or failure in living up to these internalized standards—that is, self-objectification. In a cultural context of aversive sexism such as that found in the United States today, in which overt barriers to engagement in the full range of activities are not only no longer barred but legally protected, this model may be a better way of understanding the enduring presence of internalized oppression in people’s lives than are earlier models that were based in the realities of an overtly sexist and discriminatory social context.

Fredrickson and Roberts (1997), who have used women’s experiences of bodily shame and anxiety around size and food as a data source from which to develop their construct, have posited that this view of the self can lead to habitual, self-critical, body monitoring. This, in turn, can increase women’s opportunities for shame and anxiety and disconnect women from awareness of internal bodily states, thus causing linked disempowerment on the somatic and intrapsychic realms. They use this paradigm to help explain the increase in distress and dysfunction for women at points in development where normative changes occur in the body, such as puberty, pregnancy, and menopause. Research appears to support hypotheses generated by this model, and although that research has typically remained focused on the topic of women’s relationship to weight, body, and food, it would appear to be a promising strategy for understanding the ways in which aversive, modern patriarchies become intrapsychically represented.

The development of multiple identity models is also growing as the population of feminist therapists has itself become more diverse than was the first generation of founders. Feminist therapists who are of mixed phenotype, who identify as gender-queer, who are immigrants or the children of immigrants from the Global South rather than Europe, and who self-identity as poor and working class, among others, are all bringing their voices and experiences to the table of feminist therapy.

Simultaneously, first generation feminist therapists are bringing the insights of feminists who are indigenous to and practicing in the Global South to the attention of North American colleagues (Kaschak, 2007; Norsworthy, 2007). The directionality of this information is creating a new center for feminist therapy. The creation of indigenous feminist practice in countries and cultures that are outside of the hegemonic cultures of the United States and Europe is one of the most radical, and thus potentially enhancing-to-feminism, developments in feminist therapy today. These models require feminist therapists of the Global North to be influenced in ways of being, seeing, hearing, and knowing that are inherently unavailable in Western societies. This work has created awareness of the colonial and colonizing colonial mentalities of the Euro American and Global North feminisms. Coming from cultures that parse identity along their own lines, these feminists productively subvert conceptions of gender, sex, culture, and identity that have informed feminist practice, thus amplifying the work of next-generation U.S. feminist therapists.

The paradigm of bringing an unexamined colonizing mentality to one’s work with an individual, a perspective that could only be clearly demonstrated by persons on whom such a mentality has been imposed by European and American colonizing forces, is beginning to have a major impact conceptualizations of power and empowerment in feminist practice. If the therapist insisted on using strategies for organizing experience, whether of identity or distress, that do not exist in the realities of those with whom she works, she is acting like a colonizer. The power of this metaphor to challenge the dominant culture of psychotherapy and make the culture of feminist therapy more honest about labeling, is one of the growing edges of feminist practice today.

The international voice, especially the voices of those who have resisted colonization by the Western world, invites and challenges feminist therapy as a discipline, and feminist therapists as individual practitioners, to see and deconstruct yet another layer of our assumptions about reality. This invites feminist therapists and theorists to dig deeper into assumptions, to ask more creatively what it means to invite the people into places of greater personal power, to analyze more minutely what is meant by egalitarian. For example, is diagnosis a colonizing process in which we supplant a person’s own words for their experience with a label created by and for mental health professionals? And if so, how does that further challenge feminist therapists who cannot choose to avoid the use of diagnosis?

This fertilization of the epistemic ground of feminist therapy is leading to flowering, which will eventually bear the fruit of models of feminist practice that are inherently different than those created by the first generation, whose life experiences were largely those of being Euro American or U.S.-born women of color, born at the end of the Great Depression or following World War II. Because feminist therapy is constantly applying to itself its own standards of critical analysis, it is not only likely, but necessary for further development of the model, that critiques of the perspectives gained from the standpoint of the founding generation will soon emerge.

MEN’S IMPACT ON FEMINIST PRACTICE

We know very little about the impact on the field of men as feminist therapists. Although men have participated in feminist therapy for several decades, they have only been clearly welcomed as its practitioners since the turn of the century. Feminists who are men are engaging in the same process of consciousness-raising about the toxic effects of patriarchy in their lives as did women 40 years ago. Men’s experiences as targets of patriarchy, and as its beneficiaries, are very different from those of women’s, and feminist therapy by and with men is likely to yield new and different information about how patriarchy operates. Feminists who are women have theorized patriarchy from its margins; feminists who are men are in the position to theorize patriarchy and its dangers from the center (Levant & Silverstein, 2005). Men who are not fully members of dominant groups—men of color, gay and bisexual men, men with disabilities, and so on—also experience a form of multiple identities that is unique to the experience of having some, but not full, dominant group membership in a patriarchal hierarchy. Men’s resistance to patriarchy also carries different prices than that of women. For example, such resistance is frequently coded as a betrayal of masculinity, leading to what Levant and Silverstein define as “gender roles strain” for men. Feminist therapy’s understanding of men’s distress and dysfunction needs to comprehend the meaning of being defined as traitorous and disloyal. All of these ways of knowing and experiencing are just now beginning to enter the feminist framework, and each of them will, in turn, likely transform feminist practice in some ways not yet known.

POSTMODERN, NOT POSTFEMINIST

An argument made in some segments of the larger society is that feminism has accomplished its tasks and we are now in a postfeminist era, which would obviate the value of a feminist perspective in psychotherapy. Superficially, many feminist goals, particularly reformist feminist goals, are well on their way to accomplishment in the lives of educated, middle-class, Euro American people. More women are in the professions, including psychology; more women are in positions of institutional power and authority. Laws prohibiting women’s full participation in all aspects of the culture have been struck down, and men are increasingly embracing nurturing roles as parents.

However, for most of U.S. culture and for most of the world, these gains are minimal in contrast to the continuing realities of sexism, misogyny, and related oppressive dynamics. Gendered stereotypes persist, and gender nonconformity, especially for men, continues to be a source of shaming and sometimes outright physical danger. Racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, and anti-immigrant bias are all visible and palpable tropes of popular culture. Abusive hierarchies of power and privilege remain the constant of the social realities in which all humans live. Overt and dangerous gender-based oppression occurs in many places on the planet, with increases in the trafficking, for sex and labor, of impoverished children, women, and men from the Global South. Simply because much of what occurs in Western society today has taken the form of aversive bias does not mean that it does not exist, nor that it is any less toxic than the overt bias of four decades ago.

In fact, studies of aversive bias would suggest that as patriarchies become more civilized and their dangers less overtly apparent, their potential to harm people increases, as conscious defenses against their damaging aspects are relaxed. This can be seen in the experiences of people who encounter a “glass ceiling” or other aversive bias discrimination in the workplace and in education settings. Their beliefs that the rules had changed to welcome all competent comers and their having played hard and fairly by those rules often lead to deep feelings of betrayal, grief, and existential loss when the inherent biases of patriarchal institutions are exposed. For these people, and for all of the people who come to therapy, feminist tasks have not been accomplished, and feminist therapy, which begins by telling the truth about patriarchal realities and empowering clients to know those verities, continues to have a valuable contribution to make toward healing distress.

THE CONTINUING QUESTION: CAN THERAPY EVER TRULY BE FEMINIST?

Few other social movements have their own psychotherapy branch, and almost from its inception feminist therapy has been critiqued by feminists as simply being one more version of keeping women placated—only this time in the much more dangerous guise of feminist rhetoric. British feminist psychologists Celia Kitzinger and Rachel Perkins (1993) have called for an end to psychotherapeutic practices under the feminist label, arguing that time spent in psychotherapy is a diversion from activism toward the goal of feminist social change and revolution and that any relationship that is inherently unequal cannot be a crucible for feminist consciousness. More recently Dana Becker (2005), who has written as a feminist therapist, has critiqued the notion that empowerment in the intrapsychic realm is actually helpful to women and suggests that psychotherapy, as a primarily Euro American enterprise, is unlikely to bring more power to lives of people who are oppressed and marginalized in multiple ways. She notes, correctly, that many self-identified feminist therapists have a poor grasp of the political nature of psychotherapy practice and may still reflect the “women working with women” model of feminist therapy that predominated at the outset. This author has had similar concerns (Brown, 1994) emerging from interactions with feminist therapy practitioners over more than a decade of offering training workshops around English-speaking North America.

These critiques point to the importance, for the viability of feminist therapy as a feminist enterprise, of the development and dissemination of teaching materials that emphasize the political roots of feminist practice, and the continuing value and centrality of situating psychotherapy from a critical stance, in the context of the larger social and political realities that affect human lives. As noted earlier in this volume, feminist therapists must also be part of an intellectual and ethical collective, whether actual or virtual, in which exposure to feminist theory outside of psychotherapy is made available, and where the political meanings of psychotherapy are emphasized so that practice does not devolve into “psychotherapy practiced by a feminist.” For feminist therapy to grow in the future, feminist politics must remain a touchstone and those teaching, writing about, and supervising feminist therapy must be willing to be vigilant to the loss of this epistemic center of the paradigm. The excitement that is engendered by the application of feminist theory to the process of change in psychotherapy and the power and empowerment for therapists as well as clients that is to be found in the work of feminist therapy is likely to support the thriving and continued growth of this field into the coming decades.

Summary

Feminist therapy began as a protest and as a revolutionary experiment in transforming the face of psychotherapy practice. With its radical emphasis on egalitarianism and empowerment of clients, and its close attention to gender, power, and social location as determinants of distress and resilience in human lives, it has begun to accomplish that goal. Feminist therapy theory and practice stand at the brink of their next phase of development. Feminist therapists and theorists struggle to remain radical and subversive, while wishing to continue to influence and participate in the psychotherapy mainstream. As this author recently noted,

I would like to suggest that in order to realize our visions we must never forget that feminist practice is an outsider stance. Becoming comfortably ensconced in the ranks of mainstream theories has terrible risks for feminist practice; if we seek acceptance we also risk assimilation…. Feminists must thus continuously observe ourselves for the signs of complacency, for trends towards excluding radical and disruptive voices from our own discourses. Those of us who have been placed in positions of leadership in this allegedly leaderless world must be willing to take the greatest risks, to parlay the privileges stemming from our visibility into advocacy for feminist methods in research, practice, and pedagogy in each context where we function. (Brown, 2005, p. 9)

Feminist therapy offers to its practitioners a unique and powerful way of relating to human distress. Even for a therapist not immediately drawn to the inherently political analysis undergirding feminist practice, a number of the constructs of feminist therapy theory may potentially be useful for integration into their own preferred model. For example, in working with trauma survivors, while a feminist perspective is not necessary, incorporation of several feminist constructs that increase client empowerment in the face of the extreme disempowerment and loss inherent in trauma may potentiate the effects of whatever other empirically supported psychotherapy is being utilized. Similarly in cognitive therapies, which assume a collaborative relationship between therapist and client, feminist therapy may assist such a therapist in more closely analyzing her or his methods so as to evoke increased collaboration. Just as feminist therapy is itself technically integrative, so it holds the potential to be a superordinate model of relationship between therapist and client, which may inform the practice of psychotherapists of many orientations.

Feminist therapy and feminist therapists face the 21st century wondering how transformations of our understandings of sex and gender, of power and relationships, and of the social and political context of therapy will transform our practice. Each feminist therapist discovers anew how she or he can invite the people seeking her or his care to find ways to become more powerful; each feminist therapist brings to the development of theory and practice the unique experiences of oppression, power, and privilege, as well as the collective wisdom instilled by our clients. As a model for psychotherapy, feminist therapy continues to offer the concept that psychotherapy can, and should, be liberatory and that liberation is not simply a freedom from distress, but a move toward the power of being able to know and name one’s experiences of oppression as well as those of joy. In a world increasingly affected by new and subtle ways of stealing personal and political power, feminist therapy offers a theory that scrutinizes the distress that will inevitably arise in response to these cultural currents, as well as a paradigm for creating relationships in which empowerment occurs.

Glossary of Key Terms

BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL/SPIRITUAL  A model of human behavior and development emphasizing equally the contributions of biology, intrapsychic phenomenological experience, psychosocial and contextual experiences, and spiritual/existential experiences, conceiving of all as interactive in the formation of human behavior.

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING  A process by which an individual becomes aware of how she or he has been oppressed and how that oppression is not due to individual deficits but rather caused by cultural norms.

EGALITARIAN  A relationship model for psychotherapy that simultaneously recognizes inequalities of power inherent in the psychotherapy relationship and builds into that relationship systemic strategies for making power more equal.

EMPOWERMENT  Any process by which an individual either (a) becomes aware of, and able to use, power already available or (b) gains access to new ways of being powerful.

FEMINISM  Social movements that have as their goal the eradication of discrimination founded in sex and the equal distribution of power and resources.

FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS  The awareness of gender oppression gained through consciousness-raising.

GLOBAL NORTH  Europe, Iceland, the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand; industrialized countries with either no modern history of colonization, or completely colonized by European settlers.

GLOBAL SOUTH  A term referring to parts of the world commonly called “developing” countries, the formerly colonized countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central America, and Africa; these countries are frequently nonindustrialized, exploited for their natural and human resources by the Global North; their populations have prominent melanin tones in their phenotypes.

POWER  The capacity to have impact on self and/or others.

PATRIARCHY  A social hierarchy that systemically privileges all characteristics associated with masculinity via all institutions of a society.

SECOND WAVE FEMINISM  Refers to the feminist movements created by mostly Euro American women in the United States and other Global North countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s; sometimes referred to as Women’s Liberation by its proponents.

SOCIAL LOCATION  Refers to common markers of social, public identities such as gender, phenotype, culture, social class, sexual orientation, disability, age, indigenous heritage, age cohort, religious or spiritual affiliation, size, and attractiveness.

SYMBOLIC RELATIONSHIP  A construct similar to transference and countertransference, with addition of symbolic meanings for each person of actual and perceived social locations and ongoing effects of current social and political realities on those perceptions.

Suggested Readings

Ballou, M., & Brown, L. S. (Eds.). (2002). Rethinking mental health and disorder: Feminist perspectives. New York: Guilford.

Ballou, M., Hill, M., & West, C. (Eds.). (2008). Feminist therapy theory and practice. New York: Springer.

Brown, L. S. (1994). Subversive dialogues: Theory in feminist therapy. New York: Basic Books.

Chesler, P. (1972). Women and madness. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Enns, C. Z. (2004). Feminist theories and feminist psychotherapies: Origins, themes and variations. Binghampton, NY: Haworth Press.

Kaschak, E. (1992). Engendered lives. New York: Basic Books.

Lerner, G. (1993). The creation of feminist consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.

Miller, J. B. (1976). Toward a new psychology of women. Boston: Beacon Press.

Rosewater, L. B., & Walker, L. E. A. (Eds.). (1985). Handbook of feminist therapy: Women’s issues in psychotherapy. New York: Springer.

Worell, J., & Remer, P. (2003). Feminist perspectives in therapy: Empowering diverse women. New York: Wiley.

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About the Author

Laura S. Brown, PhD, ABPP, is a clinical and forensic psychologist in private practice in Seattle. Her publications span the fields of feminist therapy theory and practice, ethics, multiculturalism, lesbian and gay issues, and trauma. She is the winner of the 1995 American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Public Service, and the Sarah Haley Award for Clinical Excellence from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, as well as the Association for Women in Psychology’s Distinguished Publication Award, and the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award of the Society for the Psychology of Women. She is past-president of APA Divisions 35 (Society for the Psychology of Women) and 44 (Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Issues), president-elect in 2009 of APA Division 56 (Trauma Psychology), and the founder and director of the Fremont Community Therapy Project, a low-fee feminist therapy training clinic.