Empowerment as Ceremony by William Epstein

Author:William Epstein [Epstein, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Social Work, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351296663
Google: DJsuDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-28T03:27:16+00:00

Empowerment and Psychotherapy

The initial passions of empowerment practice have settled into complacency, descending from the polemics of Freire and Fanon in behalf of violent political and social revolution to an enchantment with the individual’s inner life. Often adopting psychotherapy, contemporary empowerment practice entails verbal exchanges with a professional to explore and change emotions and perceptions through adaptations of cognitive-behavior therapy and even psychodynamic therapy. Consciousness raising has become psychotherapy. It attacks individual passivity—the attitudes of fatalism and self-depreciation, following Friere—as a prod to active political involvement. Unfortunately, it has become the dead end of psychological millenarianism in the pursuit of political and social transformation.

The development of a critical consciousness is the goal of Freire’s conscientization, a process of dialogue to empower peasants. “Dialogue creates a critical attitude. It is nourished by love, humility, hope, faith and trust” (Freire 1973, 45). The dialogue between teacher and student appears to be symmetrical with the psychotherapeutic relationship between therapist and patient. The goal in both is to “overcome . . . magic or naïve understanding” (Freire 1973, 46). Indeed, conscientization is similar to cognitive behavior therapy (Beck 1995) in testing reality but with a tacit script of what reality contains. Both assume that appropriate attitudes toward reality will result in appropriate behavior.

Feminist empowerment is often handled frankly as psychotherapy. “The disciplined and skillful use of self disclosure, by the therapist as well as the patient, helps women in the empowerment process which is at the heart of feminist—and all good—therapy” (Greenspan in Howard 1986, 5). “In the therapy session, it is useful to explore and validate experiences of relational empowerment and to help the patient internalize this capacity and learn to establish new relational contexts in which strengths can be affirmed and new growth facilitated” (Surrey in Jordan et al. 1991). Bricker-Jenkins and Hooyman (1986) define feminist practice beginning with consciousness raising and employ the same terms as Freire’s conscientization and psychotherapeutic empowerment.

Not surprisingly, even community organization often contains a large psychotherapeutic content, in part through the legacy of Freire’s conscientization, but also more directly as a contemporary assault on what it considers attitudes that impede empowerment. Burghardt (1982) addresses both the organizer’s “use of self” and the unconscious in organizing psychodynamic processes that draw from Freud, Rogers, and Horney. There is not a hint of agnosticism in his work that often reads as if it were mass-market prescriptions for positive thinking and self-help: “Be modest in your personal goals. . . . Actively use your personal strengths to work on areas of difficulty” (Burghardt 1982, 61).

Empowerment practice and psychotherapy have followed the same trajectory of acquiescence. What began with Freud and the early psychoanalysts as a process of release from the constraints of social custom has become its reverse—a practice of acquiescence to social norms. As Rieff (1966) has observed, the therapeutic has triumphed over the unconventional and the rebellious; the therapeutic has also undermined more substantive and necessarily expensive remedies for the social inequities that justify a concern with empowerment. In

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