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Anne Dalke's picture

Radical Therapy: A Political Activity?

Submitted by Anne Dalke on Thu, 09/25/2008 - 7:26pm.

I'm hoping to join you for class next Monday night, and in anticipation...

have been mulling over my own current project: bringing 5 years of intensive therapy to a conclusion, looking @ what didn't work (esp. my dissatisfaction w/ the lack of "reciprocity"), and trying to find a satisfactory way to "end"...

to bolster myself along the way, I have been looking @ a very 60s text, The Radical Therapist, which insists that therapy--which has been dominated by gradualist models that bolster the status quo--needs to remake itself as a political activity. The assumptions here are that the essence of all psychiatric conditions is alienation, and that alienation is the result of oppression, about which the oppressed has been mystified or deceived.

Oppression + Deception = Alienation
Oppression + Awareness = Anger
Liberation = Awareness + Contact

The book includes an expose of the "community mental health as pacification program"--the idea being that focusing on individual problems of mental health diverts the energy of an oppressed community/ghetto from its own liberation.

I guess what I'm trying to do is put on the table some questions about the political dimensions of mental health practices in this country: the degree to which they preserve the current state of things, and the degree to which they might try to interrupt them...perhaps these questions offer other angles into talking about "the material"/"real" world?

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