I am in touching distance of a first draft of my book; a plan to go on retreat at the end of February ensuring I keep a fire under me. The retreat will be mornings of practice, afternoons of reading and editing. Just the thought of being in Normandy, withdrawn into my sources of nourishment brings a smile and bodily warmth.
I am currently working on the penultimate essay; the final essay will be on “endings”, and to get in the mood I intend to leave that until I am really “ending” the book – just prior to the final submission to my publisher (hoped for this summer). But for now, my focus is on a chapter that is really important to me. Titled “where are all the women?”, I want to write to the frustration of psychotherapy – theoretically at least – being dominated by the masculine. I want to emphasise the non-gendered meaning here: both women and men have masculine and feminine energies – something I have appreciated since studying Jung and being a Vajrayana practitioner where the dance of “anima and animus” (let’s say) is figural.
The essay therefore will focus not just on the lack of women credited in the history of ideas that form and inform a humanistic psychotherapy, but moreover will speak to the predominance of a masculine ontological stance and epistemological bias. I am not alone in lamenting this being the case, Schneider and Krug once commenting “One stereotype is this tradition is a “high brow” form of philosophy, relevant only to cultural elites; hyper-individualistic and does not validate connections between people; capricious and undisciplined” (2010). What is intimated here but perhaps needs making explicit is that “high brow” is “weird” (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), and furthermore white and male. I won’t have the word space to do this theme justice – the case for all the 60 or so essays in the third part of the book (sigh) – so for brevity I will need to highlight what is the critique of the humanistic tradition through a feminist lens?
Serlin and Criswell (2014) sum up the situation with their observation that “for whatever biological or cultural reasons, women in general, and in the field of humanistic psychology in particular, tend to develop the experiential, applied, and relational dimensions of psychology, while the men tend to focus on the abstract, theoretical, analytical, and verbal dimensions of psychology”. As I have been attending to in my text, the idea is not to substitute one for the other but rather to bring both into a dynamic balance through the dance of the dialectic: i.e the mark of a humanistic psychotherapist is to bring both types of knowing (and being) into their capacity. Given the “founding fathers” of humanistic psychology and the continental philosophy that our tradition rests on tend to be white and male, the ideas of what is wholeness and well being, tend to permeate the nature of the therapeutic task. We only have to look at the various principles of the paradigm to see this bias: individualism, agency, freedom (to name but a few). Some critiques also extend to the perceived emphasis on a personal epistemology and experience – I am less inclined to agree this wholesale, but it takes a savvy practitioner to avoid a reading of subjectivity as denying intersubjectivity (both / and again, please!). One might usefully contrast the solitary heroic journey of self-discovery with something of a more radical grounding in an “eco social matrix” (Spretnak, 1999). The former, whilst perhaps understandable given the context of America and European post war, re-establishing promise and securing freedom respectively, has been characterised as subduing nature, overcoming matter and transcending the body (Serlin and Criswell, 2014). In a phenomenological sense, it conveys the forward toward the horizon being prioritised over shared, embedded and embodied histories.
In my first book, I made a case that in the weave of Western and Eastern phenomenologies one potential is the blend of top down processing and bottom up experiencing (Carter, 2023). A therapist, regardless of gender, who can bring together both ways of knowing, cognition and feeling, is best placed to serve the “suffering stranger” (Orange, 2011) sat opposite. In this essay under preparation, I will therefore present the women of our lineage, or at least a representation. My selection starts with the names often forgotten but integral to the main roots without whom the tradition would not be what it is namely the likes of Jessie Taft and Charltotte Buhler; next will be “second generation” humanistic names such as Laura Rice, Jeanne Watson and Orah Krug followed up by the philosophical voices of Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Judith Butler. I will then devote most of the essay to presenting those women who have significantly impacted my understanding and practice of humanistic psychotherapy; and who I have become passionate about presenting in my teaching and supervision work: a roll call that includes gestaltists like Laura Perls, Ruella Frank and Margherita Spagnuolo-Lobb.
I hope this to be a fitting crescendo to my book; trusting that what is most recently read will be recalled more thoroughly; and in that doing my bit to raise the loud roar of the wild women (Waterhouse, 1993).