Identification and power in feminist therapy

Abstract

In this paper, the author outlines some issues that emerged from her efforts to analyse the first and fourth sessions of a client's psychotherapy. From an initial focus on varieties of psychotherapeutic discourse and therapy-client interactions, the author moves on to explore how common and different identifications coexist with power relations which are simultaneously being elaborated. Given feminist therapy's commitment to acknowledging the real and common positions and subordination of women, questions of identification and transference are necessarily linked. However, these are also embedded within further issues of professional interests and commitments in which the discourse analyst is crucially involved. The author goes on to suggest that (1) issues of identifying and classifying discourses cannot be divorced from the ways these discourses function in the relationship within which they are elaborated; and (2) transference issues are involved in both (a) woman-woman therapy and (b) feminist analyses of feminist practice.