Miscellaneous Topics

The following list includes an assortment of documents that reach beyond the the specific issues addressed elsewhere, although some overlap with other categories as well. All represent in some way my interest in the intersection between personal lives and social contexts.

Internalized classism is the process by which a person’s experience as a member of the poor or working classes becomes internalized and influences the individual’s self-concept and self-esteem as well as relationships with others. Internalized classism, often not recognized by clients or by therapists, may be manifested in a variety of ways in psychotherapy. Active clinical attention to internalized classism can carry significant benefits for people with poor or working-class backgrounds.

This paper suggests that neither science nor psychotherapy can be separated from values, and it calls on the insights of liberation psychology to examine the role of the social and the political in psychotherapy. The principles gleaned from liberation psychology are applied to LGBT clients as a case in point, but they might equally well be employed in addressing other psychotherapeutic issues, particularly with clients who are members of marginalized groups.

This study examined over 1300 items published by the Boston Globe during 2002, the first year of the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal. The resulting article explores stereotypes about homosexuality in this coverage and describes how the coverage sometimes evoked the erroneous correlation between a gay sexual orientation and child sexual abuse.

This article highlights the distinction between overt and dialogic communications between a client and therapist. Using a case involving a lesbian therapist and a heterosexually married woman with a female lover, the article explores the complexities associated with the unintentional disclosure of a therapist’s sexual orientation to a client in ongoing psychotherapy. The discussion of issues related to therapist disclosure may be useful across a range of circumstances.