Radical Feminist Therapy: Working in the Context of Violence

By Bonnie Burstow

Book Overview

With an emphasis on violence against women and on women's responses to it - such as depression, splitting and eating disturbances - this volume furthers the radicalization of feminist therapy. It serves as a comprehensive introduction for trainees and as an ongoing resource for social service workers and therapists. Providing detailed and grounded guidance, the author examines feminist approaches to working with women and discusses issues often omitted or pathologized in general feminist counselling texts, including prostitutes battered by pimps and self-mutilation. She explores such central questions as how women can empower themselves in a sexist society; what forms internalized oppression takes and how clients can be hel

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803947879
• ISBN13: 9780803947870
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An eye opener

Bonnie Burstow's work on psychiatry from a feminist perspective gives a good basic analysis of feminist theory for newcomers, including thorough footnotes and bibliography. Dr.Burstow introduces her subject with a historical outline of the basic creation of psychiatry, a concept alien to early cultures which used midwives and what we would call homeopathic remedies. The Church plays a role in taking power away from women healers like midwives and she manages to make a link between this and the Inquisition of witches, long ago. She refers us the readers to works by author T. Szasz and others to continue with an analysis of psychiatry as it stands today. What follows is an entirely eye-opening and fresh perspective for laypeople or perhaps professional therapists who need to realign their values with their practise. In case you didn't know the dangers of today's psychiatric drugs, in view of long-term use and the uncertainty of why neuroleptics actually seem to work in the short-term, Bonnie Burstow goes over this and then goes on to suggest alternative methods of therapy which build on the traditional relationship between patient and therapist. Expanding on this essential relationship, much lauded in popular culture with the icons of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the prerequisite couch analysis, Dr.Burstow book points out the dilemma of the power differential between patient and therapist. This original book, despite a slightly off-putting title, is a must-read for psychiatrists and therapists in the field and anyone whose been given a psychiatric diagnosis, or is just curious! Prerequisite: an open-mind.