The Ideological Takeover of British Psychotherapy

“The problem with this conception is that access to truth or objectivity becomes something not open to universal access but, instead, becomes something distributed on the basis of social position.”

Last week, the magazine of one of the largest regulating boards for psychotherapy and counseling, the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), proclaimed on its front cover that, “We need to talk about race—but what is stopping us?” What was stopping us had been awkwardly demonstrated just the day before, when the British Psychological Society (BPS)’s online magazine made the decision to prevent the aforementioned conversation from happening online. This occurred when a fairly innocuous (though quite direct) letter was published as an “alternative view” by the magazine’s editor. The letter suggested that psychology seek to distance itself from “social justice” or intersectional ideology and, instead, become more focused on science and objectivity. This letter elicited such a torrent of condemnation that even after an apology bordering on self-flagellation was made by the editor (and the piece was taken down), members of the organization still threatened to cancel their affiliation.

As someone who is currently studying ideology (and its relationship to psychotherapy), this exchange piqued my interest. To me, it demonstrates some of the inherent—and not easily surmountable—problems with the adoption of intersectional, “anti-racist,” or “social justice” ideological underpinnings by psychotherapeutic practice and psychological organizations. In this article, I will briefly explain what it is about the epistemological foundation of these positions that causes the kind of reactive explosion and inability to engage with critique that the BPS article did. I will also put forward why I believe that intersectionality itself—while professing to support the underprivileged—unfortunately constitutes a closed or authoritarian system of thought, one that would be unwise to adapt psychotherapy towards.

False Idols: the Universal vs. the Particular in Intersectional Epistemology

The epistemological foundation of intersectionality and anti-racist ideology applied to psychotherapy leads it, I believe, to fall inevitably into groupthink, authoritarianism, and conflict. Often—as in the case of the BPS letter—conflict occurs between committed intersectional thinkers and those liberal thinkers who hold fidelity to the ideal of scientific objectivity, which exists separately from ideology as an ideal. Intersectional epistemology is also incompatible with those theorists who promote transpersonal values seeking to maximize human virtue or health, which are positioned as transcendent or universal and belonging to all humans regardless of particulars. This is owing to the differing conceptions of truth held by these liberal and transpersonal traditions and the intersectional/anti-racist viewpoint which I will now describe.