One of the biggest issues that we face is the lack of critical debate regarding the new orthodoxies currently governing the therapy disciplines. Completely new approaches to therapeutic practice in mental health services and social work have been introduced over the last decade or so without any evidence that they are effective. These approaches can be grouped under the rubric of ‘activist’: the telos is societal rather than individual change. One of the consequences of this lack of public debate is that people outside the therapy professions have not realised that therapy is being radically changed.
Very recently, a couple of academic social work and sociology journals have succeeded in breaking the stranglehold of the dominant sociopolitical bias in academia. Finally, we have academic papers that can start to lay the foundations of a critique of activist approaches (see here and here). One such paper titled ‘Uncontested ideas and real-world consequences: using a
meta-critical post-progressive method to deconstruct the
claims of activist therapy’ has just been published in Theory & Society by Val Thomas (psychotherapist, and founder of CTA) and Sally Satel (psychiatrist, and one of the earliest critics of ‘political correctness’ in therapy).
The authors take the opportunity to lay out and explain the radical changes that have happened in the therapy disciplines. Noting that until recently , “Despite the complex patchwork of different modalities, the profession overall endeavoured to remain functionally apolitical. Most practitioners would see their job as helping their clients increase their insight, personal agency and grasp on reality.” The current orthodoxy advocates for a radically different understanding: “The difficulties experienced by clients are deemed to be determined by their identity: their positioning within a matrix of oppressor/oppressed social groups will automatically lead to particular life experiences. The job of the activist therapist is to help the client view their problems from this politically informed perspective.”
The majority of CTA readers will be familiar with the detailed exposition that follows. However, Thomas and Satel then move onto the pressing issue of how to defend the therapy disciplines from this activist colonisation. They suggest that ‘meta-critical post-progressivism’ – ideas developed by Erik Kaufmann (Professor of Politics at Buckingham University) – could offer a starting point.
Activist scholars have deconstructed classical therapy claiming that it automatically bears the stamp of its Western colonial ‘white supremacist’ origins. Once that move has been made, any critique can be labelled as ‘reactionary’ or ‘bigoted’. A meta-critical stance would subject activist therapy to the same deconstructive method asking: What are the “… inherent power dynamics at play in how this position has been constructed.” Doing this exposes activist therapy’s inherent biases and contradictions. The authors discuss how these critical methods of analysis derived from new thinking in other disciplines have the potential to challenge the current orthodoxy in therapy. See the paper here.
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