Psychotherapy Action Network: Seeing Beyond the Crossroads

ABSTRACT

Psychotherapies of depth, insight and relationship have increasingly found themselves to be marginalized, or omitted altogether, from public conversations about how to help those who are suffering, as well as from professional discourse. A perfect storm of social, economic, technological and institutional forces, including self-inflicted wounds, have combined to undermine efforts to make in-depth treatment accessible to all of those who could find it of benefit, and especially to those who need it most. In short, psychotherapy finds itself in the crosshairs and at a crossroads. In order to respond to the threats to depth therapy, and to promote its value and benefits, PsiAN was created as an interdisciplinary advocacy organization. Our membership spans theoretical orientations, pathways to training, and clinical contexts, and this diversity represents our strength, power and capacity to advocate for change. We hope this push for change will not only benefit the field of mental health as a whole, but also help us to view our own profession with new eyes, as an appreciation of social context is incorporated further into our work. The goal of our efforts is to enhance and revitalize the perceptions, values and uses of depth therapies in the eyes of the public, policymakers and our own professions.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychotherapy
• advocacy
• diversity
• equity
• evidence-based

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Burke

Nancy Burke, Ph.D., ABPP, is Co-Chair of the Psychotherapy Action Network. She is a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, of which she is a past president. She is an Associate Clinical Professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine of Northwestern University, is past Vice-President of ISPS-US, and is on the boards of CCP, Expanded Mental Health Services of Chicago, NFP and SUSU. Her writing has appeared in Psychoanalytic Psychology, the Psychoanalytic Review, JAMA, Gender and Psychoanalysis, and various literary magazines, and she is the editor of Gender and Envy (Routledge). She has presented on the anorexia of language, the domestication of envy, the fear of knowing, and the art of mis-reading Freud, among other topics. She is the recipient of Gradiva, Fish, Fiske and three Illinois Arts Council awards, and her novel, Undergrowth, was published in 2017 by Gibson House Press. She has a private practice in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, devoted to psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, couples/family therapy and supervision.

Linda Michaels

Linda Michaels, Psy.D., MBA, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Chicago. She is Co-Chair of the Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), a Consulting Editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, and a fellow of the Lauder Institute Global MBA program. She has published and presented on the value of psychotherapy, the therapeutic relationship and technology, and scientism. She has a former career in marketing, innovation and branding, with over 15 years’ experience consulting to organizations in the US and Latin America. In addition to her doctorate degree in clinical psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, Linda is a graduate of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute’s Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy program. She also has an MBA from Wharton, and a BA from Harvard.

Janice Muhr

Janice Muhr, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Chicago. She is Co-Chair of Psychotherapy Action Network and Clinical Associate Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. Her forty-some years of clinical practice, following a short career teaching high school English, began in community mental health and has always been informed by it. In addition to her practice with adult individuals and couples, she has consulted in business settings and was clinical adjunct faculty in Northwestern University’s Counseling Psychology program for eighteen years. She has presented internationally on a wide range of topics which address mental health responses, both systemic and within the treatment dyad, to the person-in-distress from traumatic life events, most recently on othering in the field of psychology. In addition to a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, she has an A.B. and M.A.T. from the University of California, Berkeley.