Two Worlds or One? Politics Inside and Outside The Consulting Room

Under the powerful influence of the Cartesian split, American psychotherapy theories usually take for granted the separation of the sociopolitical and the psychological. The intellectual movement referred to as The Interpretive Turn, composed of postmodernism and hermeneutics, directly opposes the split. Drawing from hermeneutic conceptions of the cultural clearing, the everyday social experience of similarity and difference, and Gadamer’s description of dialogue, psychotherapy can be thought of as an encounter with difference. This way of conceiving of therapy opposes the split and welcomes Kohut’s concept of the group self as an early approach to cultural history. This way of conceiving of similarity and difference aids in meeting the challenges—such as those related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and class—therapists confront in their everyday practices. It is also suggested that some therapists could engage in the role of public intellectual, thus bringing more psychologically sophisticated interpretations of our current political struggles over authoritarianism and democracy. In that way a hermeneutic cultural history could aid in combating the rise of neo-fascism in the United States and throughout the world, and in developing ways of building a more humane society dedicated to the well-being of all its inhabitants.