On the need to reconcile cultural and professional power in psychotherapy: Humanistic principles that are foundational for feminist multicultural practice.

Abstract

Meta-analytic research has suggested that, although there are two forms of power that can be problematic in a psychotherapy context, they are rarely considered in interaction. One form, cultural power, influences the ways clients, therapists, and systems interact in relation to social identities, communities, and ascribed cultural statuses, and the other, professional power, is held by therapists by virtue of their training and the authority ascribed to them. Both forms may limit clients’ ability to be empowered in therapy. As many feminist multicultural researchers and task forces have thoughtfully explicated strategies for responding to cultural power, this paper focuses predominantly on processes for addressing professional power, which have been less well explicated. Although there is a rich body of humanistic therapy literature on maximizing clients’ agency, these core processes have rarely been framed in relation to concepts of power. This reframing contributes to prior work by feminist multicultural–humanistic therapy (FMHT) scholars by examining central humanistic principles to identify specific strategies that attenuate the misuse of this form of power. For instance, therapists teach clients to symbolize inchoate experiences (often resulting from cultural or interpersonal oppression eroding trust in oneself or one’s community), to confidently self-reference (developing resistance to stigma), and to maximize their agency within the change process (empowering them to guide their own development). Integrating these humanistic therapy principles into FMHT enhances ethical practice and holds relevance across therapies, supporting therapists’ competence, clients’ agency, and a multidimensional understanding of power in therapy.

Review of Life-enhancing anxiety: Key to a sane world.

“…Fifth, today’s students have grown up during an era in which existential-humanistic psychology and therapy are regarded as a separate school among numerous other orientations and in which it often is viewed as a historical relic (DeRobertis, 2013, 2016). With fewer than 5% of psychotherapy training faculty identifying as humanistic in recent years (Levy & Anderson, as cited in Levitt & Whelton, 2023), humanistic psychology is far from the integral vision for all psychology proposed by the likes of May (1967, 1983), Maslow (1971, 1987, 1999), and van Kaam (1966). Instead, humanistic psychology often is misunderstood and dismissed today as unscientific and lacking in research evidence (Bland, 2023b; DeRobertis & Bland, 2021), and its principles often are presented in diluted, incomplete, and/or outright inaccurate form (Bland, 2023b, in press; Henry, 2017).…”