Pro-feminist and non-psychoanalytic - and other pros and cons of psychotherapy

Any political assessment of psychotherapy practice will have to consider both the context of the therapeutic work and the guiding theoretical ideas that the therapist subscribes to. In my case, psychotherapy is linked to my teaching, and the experiences work as inspiration for my research. The kind of service that I belong to is cheap and easily accessible, but still too scarce compared to the number of persons who apply. The non-psychoanalytic stance originated more than thirty years ago as a political protest against paternalistic and dogmatic ways of doing psychotherapy. Over the years, this protest from students has developed into a collective of teachers and researchers who subscribe to communication theories and systemic approaches. The pro-feminist stance followed as the next step in the same effort to engage clients in planning and evaluating their own progress. The therapist will represent a running concern for the cultural assumptions about femininity - and masculinity - that are deployed in the culture as well as in the therapeutic encounters. The interest in seeing children as clients in their own right faces the therapist with a balancing act between allowing the child to speak up and getting the child out of the zone of burdensome responsibilities. Any ideas about special therapeutic approaches for particular groups of people are worth considering, but cannot be used to reach any ultimate or enduring conclusions of political correctness. When the distinction between the psychotherapeutic realm and the political realm is handled as binary or as hierarchical, therapy will fall short. Rather, it is confrontational dialogues about and between different approaches or schools of psychotherapy that may advance political assessment with the capacity to address both ideology and practices.