A Decade of Feminist Influence on Psychotherapy

Abstract

The last decade has seen some major impacts of feminism on the institution of psychotherapy regarding theories, treatment techniques, and assessment instruments. The changes in attitudes toward women as therapists and as clients have reflected the general advances of the women's movement in that women clients are more likely to seek women therapists and to receive treatments specifically developed for crises affecting women such as rape, pregnancy and domestic violence. The difficulties in designing empirical studies to demonstrate bias in psychotherapy have resulted in a confusing state of the art because only the higher-order interactions have consistently been significant. Attempts of some women to resist changes brought about by the women's movement and the apathy and levity of others have also presented problems in the path of progress. However, movement toward the long-range goal is encouraging when one compares the writing on women and psychotherapy in recent professional journals with examples from the 1960s.In 1963, as the first female clinical psychology intern in the U.S. Army, I was assigned a 40-year-old woman client who refused to accept m e as her therapist because I was younger than she, and a woman. She was convinced that she was assigned to the lowly female intern because her husband was only a sergeant. Her parting words as w e aborted our tenuous relationship were something like, "I'm a difficult case, honey. It's not your fault. I hope someday you'll be another Joyce Brothers." O n the other hand, recently a woman client peeked into m y office after leaving our initial session and commented, "You know,

The Problem of Gender in Family Therapy Theory

“…There have been a number of critiques of psychoanalysis and how it has disadvantaged women, which do not need to be repeated in detail here (1,4,24). Freud's pejorative attitude to the feminine, his misogyny, his treating masculinity as the human norm, his viewing female development against the standard of male anatomy are critical components of his theory, not incidental ones.…”

De la locura feminista al 'feminismo loco': Hacia una transformación de las políticas de género en la salud mental contemporánea

“…A su vez, la terapia feminista surge desde la inspiración por hacer del trabajo terapéutico un acto político, convertir la psicoterapia en una herramienta para promover un cambio social e individual y con la finalidad de brindar mejores servicios psicoterapéuticos a las mujeres (Hill, 1998). De esta forma, la terapia feminista comienza a desarrollar enfoques terapéuticos centrados en las necesidades de las mujeres y a favor de sus intereses, generando conocimientos respecto a tratamientos y modalidades de apoyo en crisis en problemas que afectan específicamente a las mujeres como la violación, el embarazo y la violencia doméstica (Brodsky, 1980;Worell y Remer, 2002;Ballou, Hill y West, 2008).…”

Rape Survivors’ Experiences of the Silent Protest

“…To situate the experiences of women participating in the Silent Protest , it is important to understand the psychological impact of rape. The women’s movement propelled systematic research into the psychological sequelae of rape (Brodsky, 1980). A prominent early study (Burgess & Holmstrom, 1974) generated the conceptual model of Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS) to encapsulate the behavioral, somatic, and psychological reactions associated with rape (Courtois, 2004).…”