Book Announcement by Malin Fors (Norway)

This book reveals four common patterns of interaction in the therapy partnership, and explains how social power dynamics influence those patterns.  Societal issues based in power and privilege inevitably enter the therapy room. In this book (American Psychological Association, 2018) author Malin Fors offers an intersectional grammar to unmask the hidden dynamics. Integrating theory, research, and a wealth of clinical narratives, Fors explores four core situations: when therapist and patient have similar levels of social power, when either therapist or patient has more privilege relative to the other, and when both therapist and patient have similar levels of nonprivilege.

This fresh synthesis – for which the author was awarded the 2016 APA Division 39 Johanna K. Tabin Book Proposal Prize – offers new language for understanding power dynamics in psychotherapy, counseling, and all treatment relationships. Clinical topics explored include voluntary and involuntary self-disclosure, visible and invisible similarities between patient and therapist, internalized oppression, and choosing whether or not to address privilege explicitly, among many others.

Nancy McWilliams contributed the Foreword to this book, which gives professionals from any therapy orientation a helpful framework for aligning their desire for social justice with healing interactions around race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, age, and other differences.

Link to publisher:  http://www.apa.org/pubs/books/4317485.aspx

About the Author:

Malin Fors is a Swedish psychologist and psychoanalyst living in the world’s most northern town, Hammerfest, Norway. She has broad experience in both clinical work and teaching. She has worked for a decade at the local hospital’s psychiatric outpatient unit and also has a busy private practice. For over 10 years, as a guest lecturer at Gothenburg University in Sweden, Fors has been teaching students in clinical psychology about how issues of power, privilege, and gender create biases in the assessment of psychopathology. She is an assistant professor at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway.

Malin Fors, MSc, Clinical Psychologist, Psychoanalyst
Finnmark Hospital Trust
District Psychiatric Center
Vest-Finnmark, Hammerfest    Norway
Email Malin Fors