In a recent email from a fellow therapist, I noticed a section below the signature labeled “Social Location.” It identified the sender as “cis, queer, white, Euro-American, middle class, post-evangelical, spiritual but not religious.” In parts of the profession email signatures amount to political personal-identity statements. They also reflect a broader shift in the field toward reinterpreting ordinary human problems through a highly ideological vocabulary.
Psychotherapy should help people make sense of their lives. But in many training programs today, students are taught to interpret those lives through the lens of power, privilege and oppression.