Psychotherapy’s Forgotten Political Narrative

Abstract

For a long time, politics was considered off limits by mainstream psychotherapy. So generations of therapists were instructed to keep away from any visible public activity, especially those that might give away their political affinities. Such avoidance, however, of direct involvement in politics in this narrow sense is only a small aspect of a much wider-ranging phenomenon. Even in therapeutic practice and theory, very little attention was devoted to how broad political factors (such as ethnicity, gender, or class) affect mental well-being and to how to refer to any political issues that might emerge in the course of therapy. Training and supervision processes have led many therapists to ignore or remove themselves from any realistic response to issues unrelated to the individual and his or her personal associations. Personal characteristics with a political interface were considered largely irrelevant to psychoanalytical techniques and were thus treated in the same interpretative manner as any other subject matter. This is how their political nature and impact was denied and removed. It goes without saying, then, that the very idea of affecting structural injustice through action on the level of reality (whether in therapy or outside it) was unfeasible. So for many psychotherapists in the mainstream, we can say that politics was a denied aspect of human relations for a long time. As is the case with denials, though the meaning of things was conscious, the attitude was marked by scorn or rejection, either of their existence or their importance. Indeed, political narratives of psychology have always been there as long as the discipline has existed without finding their way into the central therapeutic discourse. This is why the notion of politics, along with its associated contents, was excluded, an issue not to be discussed in the context of therapy (including training and supervision), and this is why it is hard to recognize it as such in therapy.