When Social Privilege Favors the Patient

This lecture will focus on the seldom-addressed therapeutic dyad in which social privilege favors the patient. Through her matrix of relative privilege, Malin Fors will discuss how social power issues are inevitably negotiated in the therapeutic setting and how this process plays out in transference, countertransference, and resistance. Drawing on empirical research from other areas on how people handle sudden loss of privilege, Fors explores the implications of such disparities and explores playful (versus more narcissistically defensive) ways to handle clinical situations in which a patient is dependent on a socially less-privileged therapist.