Thinking and doing

Inserting gender and feminism into psychotherapy

Abstract

Foucault (1986) reminds us that it is in the practices that power is actually exercised, not an ideas. This paper is an attempt to ask why, when feminism has had such an impact on the ideas of psychoanalysis and therapy, it has not deconstructed the practices. If power resides in the practices which aim to maintain the existing structures (and the existing dominant (male) symbolic) then analysis/therapy remains firmly patriarchal even as so many of its practitioners and clients are 'other'.