Class plan

Mini-lecture #1: strange facts and unfinished business

or, Why do we need a doctor in this house?

Flash discussions (15-20 minutes each)

Discussion #1: appreciating Freud, hating Freud

Discussion #2: psychotherapy as "soul medicine" - what could that mean?

BREAK

Table top work

Getting radical, (come in prepared to share, question, and grapple with the provided primary source)

Mini-lecture #2: can we medicalize psychotherapy after all? (the CBT vision)

Group mini-project: peer counseling: the most radical vision of all?

Varieties of talking

Pressman, Jack D. "America Analyzed." Reviews in American History, vol. 24 no. 3, 1996, p. 476-481.
Shedler, Jonathan, "This Is Talk Therapy: Psychotherapy is medicine for the soul," Psychology Today. May 24, 2024
Kirk Schneider, “To Feel the Awe of Living, Learn to Live with Terror and Wonder | Aeon Essays, 2019.
Overholser, James C. “Group Psychotherapy and Existential Concerns: An Interview with Irvin Yalom.” Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy 35, no. 2 (2005): 185–97.

Challenging and radicalizing psychotherapy

KEY source: the third issue of the self-published journal The Radical Therapist, special issue on WOMEN, 1970 -- this will be a focus of our tabletop work. Please read the opening editorial and then choose one or two additional articles to chew on. Come in with ideas and questions. You are not expected to "get" everything! Many of the articles were authored by major figures in third-wave feminist movement of this time. That fact makes clear how central the critique of "male-supremacist" psychotherapy was to the movement.
- - Please review also this short secondary source on the making of the "radical therapist:: Richert, L. “"Therapy Means Political Change, Not Peanut Butter’: American Radical Psychiatry, 1968-1975.” The Journal of the Society for the Social History of Medicine 27, no. 1 (2014): 104–21.

Manualizing and medicalizing

Mini-project group: Who can be a therapist? "Peer counselors" -- the most radical vision of all?