Psychologization in and through the women's movement: A transnational history of the psychologization of consciousness‐raising in the German‐speaking countries and the United States

Abstract

This study explores the psychologization of the women's movement by examining the activist practice of consciousness‐raising in a transnational perspective. We follow the lines along which P/psychological concepts that were appropriated and developed by North American feminist activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s traveled to the German‐speaking countries and were translated, adopted, and transformed by feminist activists in Germany and Austria. We explore both the process of psychologization as the practice traveled from the United States to German‐speaking countries and the various dimensions of psychologization: diffusion of Psy‐expert discourse beyond the borders of the psy‐disciplines, academization, individualization, and meta‐psychologization. With the latter term, we aim to capture the relationship between (feminist) P/psychology and its critique.

Historicizing “therapeutic culture”—Towards a material and polycentric history of psychologization

“…Exceptions include the works of Tändler (2016) and Maasen et al (2011), and Malich and Balz (2020), which propose a first historical synthesis of the psychologization process and its critics. Pache (2022) and Ruck et al (2022) have focused more specifically on its historical ties to the women's movement and feminism, Gerber (2023) to continuing professional training, while media scholar Stark (2017) has addressed the question of how psychotherapy has been disseminated to the public through the historical case of Albert Ellis' "mediated" Rational Therapy. In line with recent work on therapeutic culture, this special issue takes a historical perspective on the processes of psychologization and psychotherapization through a series of empirical case studies.…”