Feminist Therapy with Male Clients: Empowering Men to Be Their Whole Selves

Abstract

AbstractEmpowerment is the overarching goal of feminist therapy. This is accomplished through an analysis of power, gender, and social location, with key strategies including the creation of an egalitarian therapy relationship and the framing of distress as attempts at gaining power in an oppressive and patriarchal society. The field of men and masculinity, emanating from feminist scholarship and created by the pioneering work of counseling psychologists, also strives to empower men. Like feminist therapy, the field of men and masculinity focuses heavily on analyzing gender roles and also, more recently, albeit less thoroughly, attends to issues of social location. This chapter attempts to do what surprisingly has not been done before: systematically integrate scholarship from the field of men and masculinity with the tenets and processes of feminist therapy. Through this integration, it is demonstrated that feminist therapy is an excellent therapeutic modality for doing psychotherapy with men.