[The radical psychiatry trend and intervention with women (a Californian experience).]

It was in the wake of the movement for a critical psychiatry, originated by Eric Berne, that the Radical psychiatry collective developed in Berkely California at the beginning of the 70's. Starting with an analysis of the dominant therapeutic intervention, which was seen alienating, and its resultant, an oppression of which the individual is unaware, the Collective teaches a new practice represented by the following equation : consciousness of one's oppression + contact with other in the same situation + action = liberation. This equation is intended to reply to the preceeding formula : oppression + unawareness of one's oppression + isolation = alienation. Utilizing the personality composant concepts elaborated in transactional analysis, that is the ego state : the Parent, the Adult, and the Child, the Collective shows that certain aspects of social Males, learned through socialization, are unequally and differently developed in men and women. Consequently, a harmonious meeting of man and woman is impossible. To resolve these difficulties, the Collective runs mixed therapeutic help, and women's groups. The latter, developed primarily by Hogie Wyckoff, take into consideration the specific oppression of women and help them to work on those qualities wich are insufficiently developed or undervalued by an inequitable capitalist society. The thrust of radical psychiatry associates the fundamental characteristics of capitalist society, principally human relation, and the problems of everyday individual experience. It also demonstrates the logical ordeming of social males - limiting and unsatisfactory by functional -in such a society. The approach is highly interesting in relation to therapeutic practice with women in general, and more specifically, with social and health service clients. Nevertheless, the approach should not be limited to the sole consideration of the concrete and interactional factors involved in the relation between an intervener from the educated middle class and a client from a popular milieu, often deprived at many levels. The repercussions of class differences on a supposedly equal relationship are still unknown, since radical psychiatry interveners works principally with a middle class clientele. This gap constitutes the principal limit of the observed approach, a limit which should be more thoroughly investigated and analysed.