Intended Audience
Professor Ami Harbin (Oakland University) will give a public lecture called "Feeling Formation in the Post-Traumatic Therapeutic Encounter." An abstract of the lecture is below.
Abstract
In this paper, I consider the therapist-client relationship in post-traumatic therapeutic encounters, whether in response to assault or other traumas, bringing insights from feminist relational philosophy of emotions to offer new directions for conceptualizing the relationship. I outline and contest the presumption of individualism in some conceptualizations which understand the therapist as having the key role of helping clients identify, manage, or cope with their feelings. Drawing on feminist philosophy of emotion, and expressivism in particular, I articulate the need for a more robust understanding of therapists as sometimes participants in feeling formation.
Many approaches to understanding the function of therapy make it seem like the feelings are formed and waiting to be named, identified, possibly in part by having their somatic dimensions recognized. Less discussed are the ways therapists are and can be necessary participants in the formation of the feelings at all.
We might legitimately worry that such a view gives therapists too much power to shape the client’s experience or memories. This concern properly identifies the real vulnerability of the clients to receiving uptake, to being dismissed, or to being responded to in such a way that their experiences will not be recognizable to them. But without a clear understanding of the proper role of therapists in feeling formation, we cannot understand or evaluate the success of such therapies. We need a sufficiently relational account of feeling formation in therapeutic contexts to understand the marks of effective therapy, beyond individualistic presumptions.