Sponsored by the Michigan Psychoanalytic Council Foundation (MPCF)
This is an in-person only, four-hour workshop that is experiential in nature. Meeting time is 10:00 -3:30 with a lunch break from 12:00-1:30 (please bring your own or visit nearby options). Location: The Michigan League in The Michigan Room, 2nd floor.
Abstract
This workshop addresses disparities in social privilege and their practical implications for psychotherapists. Dr. Fors will discuss core themes of her book, A Grammar of Power in Psychotherapy (APA Books), and her upcoming book, tentatively titled Working with Interpersonal Power Dynamics in Psychotherapy (Guilford Press). Most training on cultural competence, power-sensitive ethics, feminist psychotherapy, and similar areas focuses on addressing power discrepancies. This workshop goes further: it is about repair, about what to do in the clinical setting beyond noticing unfairness or improving one’s
“cultural competence” or creating ”cultural safety.” Without minimizing differences among varying social power categories such as racism, ageism, homophobia, and sexism, it aims to integrate scholarship from a range of human rights fields into a flexible construct that is useful regardless of which power theme is addressed. Dr. Fors will suggest non-shaming ways for therapists to engage with difficult topics, without anxiety about making errors or being insufficiently competent. She will posit that social power issues are embedded in all psychotherapy and that ignoring their presence can lead to errors in
building the alliance, developing a case formulation, making interventions, and noticing trauma triggers. Becoming more aware of power dynamics helps us make more effective technical choices. The seminar suggests how to increase therapeutic effectiveness within the therapist´s preferred model. In other words, its perspective can easily be integrated with any therapy method. Dr. Fors posits a matrix of relative privilege that includes four core patient therapist dynamics: similarity of privilege, privilege favoring the therapist, privilege favoring the patient, and similarity of non-privilege. Clinical topics explored include, among many others, voluntary and involuntary self-disclosure, visible and invisible similarities between patient and therapist, internalized oppression, and choosing whether or not to address privilege explicitly.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Distinguish between four sources of power in the clinic: bureaucratic, sociopolitical, relational-transferential, and professional.
2. Enumerate four different models that demonstrate a continuum of internalized
dominance.
3. Describe technical issues to consider before wording a political interpretation.
4. Describe technical issues to consider before choosing self-disclosure as an intervention.
5. Compare three different frames of cultural understanding of our patients.
6. Conduct a power-sensitive case formulation.
Biography
Malin Fors, Dr.Philos., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst residing in Hammerfest, Norway—the world's northernmost town. Dr. Fors has served at the local psychiatric outpatient clinic and in private practice for 17 years. She is Adjunct Associate Professor at University of Technology Sydney and Associate Professor at the Arctic University of Norway. She has been a guest lecturer in psychology for numerous universities in Scandinavia and teaches medical students about cultural sensitivity and power issues. She is the author of A Grammar of Power in Psychotherapy (APA Books, 2018), recently translated into Swedish, for which she won the Johanna Tabin Award from the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. She has appeared in a Master Clinician DVD in the APA Psychotherapy Series. In support of her upcoming book, Working with Interpersonal Power Dynamics in Psychotherapy, Dr. Fors was an
Erikson Scholar at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2020. She received the Research Award for Finnmark Hospital Trust, Norway, in 2021, and was awarded the Psychotherapy Literature Stipend by the Stockholm Academy for Psychotherapy Education (SAPU) in 2022. Dr. Fors is currently a teaching and supervising faculty member of Institute for Psychotherapy Oslo.
References
Fors, M. (2018a). Malin Fors: The Dynamics of Power and Privilege in Psychotherapy with Malin Fors [DVD for APA: Series 1 – Systems of Psychotherapy]. APA Publications.
Fors, M. (2018b). A grammar of power in psychotherapy: Exploring the dynamics of privilege. American Psychological Association.
Fors, M. (2025). Power and privilege. In The Sage Encyclopedia of Mood and Anxiety Disorders (Vol. 3, pp. -).
Sage. Hörk, Vujičić, & Fors (2024). How female therapists and their patients deal with being a disputable, unimaginable, or occasional Swede: Explorations of similarity of non- privilege. European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy, 14, 175-190.
Jagdeep, A., Jagdeep, A., Lazarus, S., Zecher, M., Fedida, O., Fihrer, G., … Viswanathan, I. (2024). Instructing animosity: How DEI pedagogy produces the hostile attribution bias. Report presented by the Network Contagion Research Institute & Rutgers University
(NCRI).
