Intersectionality and Psychotherapy with an Eye to Clinical and Professional Ethics

Abstract

Abstract Clinical and professional ethics is primarily an issue of power. Born out of the historical anti-racist, anti-sexist, and class struggles of women of color, intersectionality is a theory and method for actively attending to issues of power, which function through social constructions of difference and diversity. Whilst intersectionality is not a form of psychotherapy, it provides a framework of thinking and practice that explicitly addresses the mutually constitutive relationship between social contexts of inequality due to divisions based on difference and the psychological impact of inhabiting divisive contexts. It is incumbent upon psychotherapy to provide forms of therapeutic interventions that offer insight and recovery from destructive fragmentary ways of being. The value of intersectionality is that it explicitly names and foregrounds the issue of social inequality and unequal power relations. Furthermore, intersectionality encompasses specific reference to the play of power dynamics arising from context. Intersectionality locates the (re)production of identity in the conditions of context; thereby resisting reductionist formulations of mental distress, which stigmatize individuals and groups. The importance of emphasizing location or context enables a repositioning of shame and blame from the individual to the situations they inhabit. If the experience of oppression is intersectional, it could be argued that an ethical position for psychotherapy is an intersectional position. Significantly, the Black feminist historical roots of intersectionality enable a psychosocial therapeutic approach that foregrounds the political dimension of the lived experience of inequality and insists that there is nothing neutral about the psychosocial experience of oppression.

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