Voices of Feminist Therapy

Elizabeth Friar Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317376767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

Feminist therapy was created in the late 1960s, concurrent with the founding of The Association for Women in Psychology. Its early practitioners had diverse lifestyles, backgrounds, and often unconventional training, but all had a common and radical goal of providing an alternative therapy for women whose mental health was still defined in terms of male-pleasing behaviours and rigid social roles. Originally published in 1995, the contributors share the personal experiences and reflections that helped them revolutionize therapy for women, particularly poignant and instructive at the time, as psychotherapy evolved from client-centred and individualistic to bureaucratic and socially and politically conservative.

I
Radical Roots

1
The Radical Edge: Feminist Therapy as Political Activism

SARAH F. PEARLMAN

There are these moments when you know that how you see the world will never be the same. For me, it was reading “Sisterhood is Powerful”¹ and Adrienne Rich … and listening to Meg Christian sing in the small basement of an inner city church.

This article is about my history and changes as a feminist and as a feminist therapist. It is also about my perception and my experience of the radicalization of a community of women who lived in Hartford, Connecticut, during the early and mid-1970s. Thus, my story is part of the history of feminist therapy as well as the history of the beginning of the Second Wave of American feminism.

The Context/The Times

I have thought of myself as a feminist since 1971. Like many other women of that particular era, I was a woman who had married too young and had children too early. Although my life in many ways had followed a stereotypical path as wife and mother, my personality has always tended towards the adventurous and iconoclastic so that I had managed some departures. I had returned to college to finish my degree (unheard of for married women in 1960)… and I was not a newcomer to politics or protest since I had been intensely involved in anti-Vietnam war organizing and activism.

I was in graduate school in the early 1970s and sitting in classrooms listening to my male professors lecture how mothers were responsible for a vast array of psychological ills including schizophrenia and homosexuality, that responses on psychological questionnaires that indicated discontent with the female role were signs of pathology, and that vaginal orgasm was the only normal or mature orgasm. One of my more ironic memories is of proposing to write a paper on feminist therapy for a course in individual psychotherapy and being turned down. The reason my instructor gave was that there were too few references and that it was not a viable topic!

America in the early seventies was still reeling from events of the sixties: the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the killing and imprisonment of numerous Black political leaders, ghetto riots across the country, and huge anti-war protest demonstrations. We were still in Vietnam, hopes of a Black power political movement were fading, and the new left and anti-war protest movement had begun to dissipate. However, it was still the counter-culture era of hippies, drug use viewed through a lens of fun and enhancement of experience, and urban and back-to-the-land communes. To remain a traditional wife seemed like terminal imprisonment, and I catapulted (along with many of my friends) out of my marriage and suburban living into the intoxicating atmosphere of the second wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

The concept of sisterhood was then a passionate and powerful ideal. Health collectives and consciousness-raising groups were multiplying across the country and there was a critical outpouring of feminist analysis that attacked every established patriarchal ideology or belief from history to religion to medicine. Our women’s bodies were a special site of protest and insistence … not only that we must have the right to reproductive choice, but that knowledge (taking back our bodies from doctor-dominated medicine), pride in our bodies, and controlling our sexuality was crucial to our freedom. I was very influenced by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and was convinced that body shame and repression of sexual desire and the senses were connected to political domination. Body and sexual liberation, including liberating masturbation, became a revolutionary obligation and I had few friends who did not possess a collection of menstrual sponges, spéculums, and/or vibrators.

Also, Kate Millett² had positioned Freud and penis envy squarely in an historical context of over-reaction to both biology and nineteenth century European Feminism (and under-reaction or blindness to male-dominated culture) … confirming that psychological theories functioned to maintain male domination and female inferiority. The abuse of women patients/clients (mind-numbing medications, electric shock therapy, sexual abuse by therapists) by the male psychiatric establishment was beginning to be documented.³ In addition, articles by women psychotherapists^4,5 were confronting traditional sex roles, proposing that the female role be expanded to include such behaviors as assertiveness and mastery. Change, not just adjustment by women to their respective situations, was now the goal of therapy.

By 1974, I was working as a consultant to a rape crisis service. It was devastating to listen to the stories of the women who had been viciously assaulted, to hear their terror and shame, and to see how they were mistreated in hospital emergency rooms, by police, and later in the courtroom … and to know that their rapist was walking around free. Women who were beaten by husbands and boyfriends were beginning to call the service and some women were disclosing incest. I don’t remember exactly when I and my co-workers began to comprehend that rape was not random, but epidemic and that what we were observing was an institutionalized acceptance of violence towards women, and a legal system that served to protect male privilege, including sexual privilege. This changed us all … a change leading to a feminism that was becoming increasingly anti-male.

Concurrent with anti-rape organizing, the Hartford Women’s Center became a primary meeting place and center of feminist activities for women. Jill Johnston was one invited speaker, leaving in her wake such concepts as lesbian nation and that revolutionary feminism and heterosexuality were contradictions. Lesbianism became a strong political stand and fewer heterosexual women were attending Center events as lesbians began to take the organizing lead. In addition, along with the emergence of separatism and other radical lesbian feminist beliefs, there became an intensification of an ideology of political purity or correctness. And together with many of my previously married heterosexual friends, I began to at first identify politically with lesbianism, then fell in love with a woman, and came out.

In essence, I was part of a community of women who had become politically radicalized. A more revolutionary feminism had replaced our initial liberal feminist beliefs and ideals. Many of us had come out as lesbians and the issue was no longer equality. A sense of deep comraderie and joyousness matched our political seriousness and we believed that we were taking back our lives. We wanted a new world. What we wanted was the end of the patriarchy (and the end of capitalism).

Feminist Therapy: The Radical Edge

By the mid seventies, mimeographed articles on a more radical brand of feminist therapy were being distributed by feminist therapy collectives and study groups around the country as the Women’s Liberation Movement moved from a liberal to a more radical understanding and position on women’s oppression. Although there was an ongoing debate about whether male-oriented psychological theories could be revised and made useful for women, a new feminist therapy was emerging. This new therapy was anti-theoretical, anti-male, and anti-power in reaction to both a traditional psychology which inferiorized women and separated the understanding of people from the real conditions of their lives… and a traditional psychotherapy, which repeated the power relations between women and men in an exploitive therapy milieu.

Traditional psychotherapy was viewed as conducted by a (mostly) male authority figure who remained personally anonymous, listened to his clients through a harmful-to-women (classical psychoanalytic) theory, considered himself an expert on the female experience, and was part of a professional elite which mystified and concealed knowledge. He interpreted his (female) client’s motivations, told her what her experience was (or should be), labeled all reactions or unwanted/undesirable behaviors towards him as transference, and pathologized the client through disconnecting her struggles (called “symptoms”) from the political realities of poverty, race, class, role, gender oppression, heterosexism, and powerlessness.

The goal of this new feminist therapy was no longer individualistic or “personalist”; that is, self-actualization through expansion of the feminine role. Our vision now was to help women change their lives and to politicize them in the process. Thus, I learned and practiced a feminist therapy based on such concepts as: all personal experience was political, that women were healthy, and that it was the complex destructiveness of female socialization and the role which were sick. The major concept which informed feminist therapy was that of the empowerment of women. I believed that this was achieved primarily through egalitarianism or “de-powering” the therapy relationship, and by returning authority to woman through viewing the client as an expert on herself. Empowerment meant normalizing women’s experience and reactions in order to decrease self-blame, encouraging connection with other women and a women-identified identity (that is, identifying with all women as a class), facilitating political understanding of personal experience, and encouraging participation in community activities and ultimately engagement in feminist activism. I believed that lesbianism was a more normal sexual/relational life choice than heterosexuality (there was a time when I believed that all of my clients should withdraw from men and come out as lesbians). I thought that women should end abusive relationships and I encouraged relational empowerment through behaviors that included assertiveness, limit setting, and the direct expression of feelings including anger.

To equalize or balance the therapist/client relationship, I would frequently self-disclose to establish commonality and make myself known as a person who had experienced similar difficulties and struggles, believing that this reduced self-condemnation in clients and increased their hopes for change. In addition, I looked for opportunities to demystify (teach) therapy and would explain my thinking or observations that led me to insights and interventions. However, I believed that my primary task as a feminist therapist was to facilitate political understanding of the woman’s problems. Thus, I would point out the commonalities of problems and experiences that I thought most women shared. In addition, I would affirm reactions to struggles and conditions as understandable and appropriate in order to de-pathologize the woman and reduce her tendency towards self-blame.

Also, I would often utilize alternative therapies such as Gestalt and bio-energetics and believed in a mind-body approach; specifically that the body was the physical manifestation of personality through muscular structuring. I was convinced that female subordination was structured in women’s bodies and lodged in feminine mannerisms, that women’s bodies needed to change in order for women to change, and would frequently recommend self-defense training in order for the woman to achieve a new and more powerful sense of her body. Also, many women were then pre-orgasmic due to sexual misinformation (orgasm through heterosexual intercourse), and teaching women how to have orgasm and to sexualize one’s body through sensualizing techniques and masturbation was often an important part of therapy.

Another primary feminist belief was that therapy should be accessible to everyone so that important issues were money and fees. This meant that I needed to balance my need to make a living with what clients could afford and I attempted to do this through a policy of negotiating or adjusting fees downward during times of financial strain (as well as occasional bartering). In addition, my vision of feminist therapy included being a resource on events and activities and I would encourage joining consciousness-raising groups, participating in community activities, and establishing friendships with other women in order to build relational resources and women identification. Since I was an active participant in my community, my clients and I were often part of the same social network. Personal/professional boundaries did not seem that important and some of my clients became friends after therapy ended. Actually, professionalism was quite suspect during those times and formal professional training was not considered necessary to gain skill as a therapist (opinions which were personally offensive to me since I had worked hard to complete graduate training).

Overall, the vision of the radical edge of feminist therapy (a blending of feminism and radical therapy) was to free women from destructive socializing influences, help them to change their personal lives, encourage them to learn to work collectively and cooperatively with other women, increase their political awareness, and facilitate their eventual participation in political activism. To me and other radical feminists, feminist therapy as means to individual personal change was not enough. Feminist therapists were to be agents of political change and politicalization, and political activism was thought of as the crucial end point in healing or recovering from female socialization. My sustained belief was that therapy could serve to help women in their journey towards political consciousness and that women clients would become part of a revolutionary movement and add to our growing numbers who were struggling to end patriarchy.

New Contexts/New Understandings: Maintaining Feminist Integrity

By the late seventies, the ideal of sisterhood and the sense of oneness or the sameness of all women faded as assertions of race, class, and ethnic difference began to emerge. These assertions unveiled a feminism which had been based on white, middle class values and privileges, and was frequently irrelevant to African-American and other minority women. While a feminist (psychoanalytic) psychology of women had evolved,^6,7 its theory and practice reflected the overall limitations of feminist thinking, overgeneralizing experience, not accounting for differences between women, and pseudo-including women from other backgrounds and cultures. What had become apparent was that gender was not always the primary site of identity, loyalty, or oppression for women… particularly when more immediate and traumatic oppressions were prevalent. In addition, the feminist movement had splintered into multiple factions and fragmentation increased as communities and groups polarized around a variety of ideological issues (separatism, pornography, transsexuals).

Although feminist ideas of equality in both public and private relational life had entered national and global consciousness and some legislative changes had occurred, the entrenchment and resiliency of the patriarchal/capitalist power structures remained the same. In addition, while some women were able to attain success and affluence, recessions began to cycle into the economy. The feminization of poverty became an increasing reality and female economic dependency accelerated as the economy and then opportunity declined.

I had also begun to understand that women came into therapy, not to be politicized by a therapist or to change the world, but to have their personal world change and to feel differently about themselves. Personal consciousness re-took the lead over political consciousness and the radical edge subsided as feminist therapy returned to its initial “individualistic” position. And as I changed with the times and with age and experience, new realizations emerged. I was beginning to see that a strictly feminist approach was insufficient … particularly for women who had grown up in chaotic and abusive surroundings and who were left with vulnerabilities and struggles which made functioning and emotional survival extremely difficult. Also, it was becoming clear to me that I needed additional ways to understand and to respond in therapy, and I gradually evolved a framework which merged feminist thinking with a revised psychodynamic approach (primarily object relations and self-psychology theories).

In addition, as I watched the economic situation change, I saw that leaving problematic relationships, even abusive ones, was a highly personal and frightening decision … and that women who ended marriages without financial and relational resources entered a situation of extreme hardship, emotional as well as economic. Another realization was that what was erotic was different for different women, that heterosexuality was not simply sexual repression, and that not all women would become lesbians. I learned also that power is clearly inherent in the therapist/client relationship, but that it does not have to be abusive or exploitive. Rather, it can be the kind of power or influence that helps people to change in the ways they want. And I began to understand my own need for personal and professional boundaries and that therapy could be adversely affected by confounding roles.

Yet, those radical years were the years when I was most myself and my work most congruent with what I believed. I am a very different therapist now. However, it has not been easy to redefine therapy, relinquish polarized beliefs, maintain a sense of integrity or sustain some political vision in these hard times of counter-reaction, reduced opportunity, social manipulation and governmental unresponsiveness. Nor is it easy to lose a dream and struggle with feelings of betrayal, yet remain intensely visionary in how I believe women’s lives should be.

References

1. Morgan, Robin (Ed). 1970. Sisterhood is powerful: An anthology of writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement. NY: Basic Books.

2. Millett, Kate. (1970). Sexual politics. NY: Doubleday & Co. Inc.

3. Chesler, Phyllis. (1972). Women and madness. Garden City: Doubleday.

4. Kronsky, Betty. (1971). Feminism and Psychotherapy. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 3, 2, 89–98.

5. Shainess, Natalie. (1970). Is there a separate feminine psychology? New York State Journal of Medicine, 70, 24, 3007–3009.

6. Chodorow, Nancy. (1978). The reproduction of mothering: Psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

7. Euchenbaum, Luise & Orbach, Susie. (1983). Understanding women: A feminist psychoanalytic approach. NY: Basic Books.

2
From Chicago to Rainbow Bridge: In Search of Changing Woman

JOAN SAKS BERMAN

Changing Woman is one of the Holy People in Navajo mythology, perhaps the principal figure among them. Kin’aalda, the female puberty ceremony was first performed for her. She was involved in the creation of the Earth Surface People, creating the first four clans from parts of her body. She was also involved with the meeting at which they were taught how to control the wind, lightining, storms, and animals.

Rainbow Bridge is a rock formation considered by some to be one of the Navajo holy places. Since the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and creation of Lake Powell, it is reachable only by boat, or by hiking with backpack for 2V2 days.

This was the beginning paragraph of a paper I wrote about my work with Native American women, which was first presented at the Advanced Feminist Therapy Institute (AFTI) and the Association for Women in Ps...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Radical Roots
• Feminist Therapists and Their Organizations
• The Early Experiences of Feminist Therapists
• Being Our Own Models and Inventing the Therapy Our Clients Need
• Transitions
• Epilogue