Latina Realities

Essays On Healing, Migration, And Sexuality

Oliva Espin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429978944
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book emphasizes psychology's role "as a means of human welfare", focusing on the complexities of the psychological development of immigrant women, Latinas, and other women of color and issues relevant to providing psychological services to them.

Part One

Experience as
a Source of
Theory and Method

Feminist epistemology starts with the conviction that “the personal is political.” Translating the phrase into academic language, I understand it to mean that “the personal is theoretical.” The essays included in this section present significant aspects of the development of my thinking about the theory and practice of psychology. Chapter 1, “Giving Voice to Silence,” summarizes the most significant turning points of my professional development. This chapter offers the reader insights that illuminate most of the other essays in the book. In Chapter 1, originally written as the acceptance speech for the 1991 Award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Public Service from the American Psychological Association, I reflect on the connections between theory and experience. These reflections illuminate how my personal experiences have affected my theoretical perspectives and also have implications for the theory and practice of psychology.

Chapter 1 identifies the challenges and frustrations that eventually produced professional insights despite the difficulty of questioning traditional ideas of what constitutes knowledge in psychology. My training emphasized the need to be “objective” rather than “subjective” in research. The issues I wanted to explore professionally were already deemed less than deserving of professional attention because they focused on women who belonged to nondominant social groups. In the past decade, however, I have become convinced of the value of subjectivity in the development of knowledge—and less fearful of being judged by pseudoscientific “objective” standards. The notion that personal experience is not objective and thus always suspect represented a barrier to my professional development. But the climate of the scientific world is changing, albeit rather slowly. It is now possible to admit to subjective experiences as a source of valid study. That change in climate, inspired largely by feminist theory, is transforming the academic disciplines—psychology included. This chapter is a plea for acknowledging the situated nature of knowledge in psychology and the relevance of this understanding for research and practice.

As a feminist and a psychologist, I strive to understand personal experiences not only as interesting events in one’s life or individual exercises in consciousness raising but also as sources of theory. This understanding provides practical guidelines for working with others in therapy or in teaching. In both of the chapters in this section, my personal experience serves as a source of theory to better understand the lives of other women.

Obviously, experience is always subject to revision and reinterpretation. Experience is not transparent. Because I am trained as a psychologist, I am a feminist, and I am writing in what is for me a second language, I interpret my experience from a certain perspective and present it accordingly. These pieces were written several years ago and my interpretation of some of the experiences I describe is different now from when I originally wrote about them. Of necessity, the pieces describe only brief aspects of experience. And experience—my own and others’—is always filtered through a myriad of factors. Even the decision as to which experiences to focus on and which to ignore is determined by circumstances. A multiplicity of factors affected my choice of my experience of return to my country of origin to focus a discussion on the theoretical importance of experience in Chapter 2.

My first serious attempt to make personal experience the source of theory, research, and practice is represented in Chapter 2. “Roots Uprooted” was a long time in the making; I needed to discover what professional and personal events held a kernel of ideas that could inform the development of feminist theory and practice in psychology. And above all, I had to unlearn rigid notions about what constituted scholarly writing.

The first version of the chapter was written for a presentation in 1985 at the Women’s Theological Center in Boston for the series “Historical Dislocation and Uprootedness.” Except for an abridged version in the Boston feminist monthly Sojourner the piece long remained unpublished. Finally, after several revisions, it was published in 1992, but not in a psychology journal. Rather, it was published by an interdisciplinary journal focused on writing by Latinos. Shortly thereafter (as the credit note states), a slightly modified version of the same piece served as the basis for my introductory chapter in a coedited book on the mental health of refugee women, simultaneously published as a volume of the journal Women and Therapy. The chapter represents the first time I dared present the interconnections I saw between personal and scholarly pursuits. When I reread this piece now, I see my defensiveness about the approach I used. I felt the need to insist that the information provided really had “scientific” implications. I was trying to convince my scholarly audience of the validity and “seriousness” of this source of data. In the past few years, the increased acceptance of other approaches to constructing psychological knowledge makes that defensiveness less necessary. But when this piece was initially written in the mid-1980s, that acceptance was not readily forthcoming. In fact, many small individual efforts contributed to this transformation in psychology. When I wrote this piece, I hesitated to take the risk; yet I had the strong intuition that there was value in my approach. Then, I knew very few others who shared my conviction. Over time, I realized many psychologists shared this profound conviction about the need to transform the nature of psychological knowledge through a feminist perspective and methods.

Regrettably, the research project I mention briefly at the end of Chapter 2 was never done. Instead, I focused my attention on an absorbing and substantial project on the sexuality of immigrant women. That work is described in the final chapters of this book and soon will appear as a separate book. There remains important psychological information to be discovered from the experiences of women who return to their countries of origin after living most of their lives elsewhere. Whether it is me or another scholar who pursues these questions is unimportant. The investigation will contribute valuable insights to the field of immigration studies.

Considered together, the chapters in this book argue for the validity of the personal as a source of theoretical knowledge. They do this in two ways. First, the simple progression of my own thinking is revealed, from the timid comments in “Roots Uprooted” (Chapter 2) to the bolder and riskier statements in “On Knowing You Are the Unknown” (Chapter 5), penned more recently and included in the next section of the book. But more important is the historical progression explained in Chapter 1, “Giving Voice to Silence,” a description of personal and professional development that runs parallel to, intermingles with, and profits from the awareness brought about by the feminist movement—in and out of psychology— and by the paradigm shift occurring in psychology.

My attempts to create knowledge and theoretical understandings on the basis of the information provided by my experience and that of my therapy clients and psychology and women’s studies students over twenty years is significant because it can constitute one vital thread in the tapestry of a renewed psychology. This renewed psychology will be truly feminist and encompass all of human experience.

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1 Giving Voice to Silence: The Psychologist as Witness

Since new experiences to some extent change the meaning of the life history, and the single items of the life course gain in turn a different significance within the new whole, we may rightly say that the past of the person is in continuous change.

—Angyal, 1965, p.63

Paraphrasing these words from Andras Angyal, I can truly say that receiving an APA Distinguished Professional Contribution Award has changed the meaning of my professional past.

It would sound elegant and perhaps convincing to say that I knew all along where my professional choices and circumstances were leading me. But that is simply not the truth. A web of historical events beyond my control, personal experiences, ideas, feelings, decisions, indecision, chance, and people have brought me here. Sometimes I was consciously choosing, sometimes life was choosing for me. As the Beatles say, “Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.” Or, to use a more scholarly source, according to Bandura (1982), “chance encounters play a prominent role in shaping the course of human lives” (p.747). While “most developmental models of human behavior presuppose a developmental determinism in which childhood experiences set the course of later development” (Bandura, 1982, p.747), other factors such as the impact of sociocultural change, unpredictable occurrences in the physical world, and chance encounters can and do become determinants of life paths (Bandura, 1982).

What I would like to describe in the present article are some of those events, decisions, and chance encounters that have shaped my professional life and, through that process, present you with some of my thoughts about psychology. I would like to describe for you some of the “silences” I have observed in psychology and some of the ways in which I have sought to “give witness” to the experience of women who have entrusted me with knowledge about their lives in therapy, teaching, or research.

In order to do this it is essential for you to understand my own personal history. I was born in Cuba. My family, although not rich, was stable and placed great value on education. During my high school years, I was sure that I would have finished my college education and had a doctorate by the time I reached 25. But then, the final years of the Batista government, during which the universities were closed, and, later, the advent of the Cuban Revolution completely disrupted my life plans and adolescent dreams of achievement. Survival became the primary concern, particularly after I left Cuba.

As a young woman in my early twenties, I lived in four countries and three different continents in the course of three years. I felt rootless (Espín, 1991b). I felt I had lost my incipient sense of identity. The painful sense of being different was forever associated with my sense of self The work I was doing, teaching and mentoring young women, demanded a level of responsibility and maturity beyond my years. Despite many obstacles, I completed my baccalaureate degree, and this accomplishment tethered me to my earlier and more stable identity. My own learning and teaching experiences provided me with a deep sense of accomplishment, purpose, and solidity.

After I finished my bachelor’s degree in Costa Rica I received a fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in psychology in Belgium. I was by then 30 and experiencing the pressures of female socialization, the expectation of marriage and children. It had never occurred to me to question that the heterosexual path was the only one available to fulfill my emotional needs. I entered and soon left a disastrous marriage, the flight from which brought me to the United States.

In this country I quickly entered and finished a doctoral program in counseling psychology. This transition forced me into a minority person’s experience, for in the United States being a Hispanic person has very specific emotional, social, and identity implications that I had never confronted before. During these years I fell in love with a woman and went through a coming-out process as a lesbian. Although two separate processes, these experiences deeply altered my adult identity and forever placed me at the margin.

I offered you this brief sketch of my life so that you might understand how and why I am compelled to listen to the experiences of marginal people. My own experience of not being heard, seen, or understood created in me a passion to give voice to others’ experiences.

“Like many of those who have ‘discovered’ the idea of cultural psychology, I found my thinking was enormously influenced by the experience of going to a radically different culture” (Cole, 1990, p.291). Although I did not go, as is the usual case for psychologists in a cross-cultural context, “with the assignment of figuring out how growing up in cultural circumstances markedly different from my own influenced the mental processes of the local people” (Cole, 1990, p.291), my working and studying in different countries made me aware of the different “mental processes of the local people.”

I had personally experienced the ever-presence of human variability. Even among the peoples of the Western countries where I had lived, differences were noticeable. It was clear to me that there were many valid ways of being human and that human development had many different healthy courses. Most important, experiencing myself in different countries and different languages taught me things about who I was that I would have never had access to had I not experienced myself in these cultural and linguistic contexts.

It seemed obvious to me, then as now, that since “the self of the observer is always implicated, it should be converted into an invaluable tool” (Reinharz, 1979, p.241). However, my professional training had taught me to remain detached and objective. All my training “defined the self as a source of error rather than as a source of knowledge, or as an impediment rather than a conduit for discovery” (Reinharz, 1979, p.252). I was taught to suspect the validity of the knowledge I already had and encouraged to do research that “objectively” portrayed some experiences while completely discarding others. In my earliest research I felt frustrated by the fact that I did not have categories to classify and quantify some of the most interesting data provided by the research participants (Espín, 1980).

My training had not prepared me for working with most of my clients. My bilingual clients were switching languages in the course of the therapy hour and changing topics and mood with these language switches. Women from different Latin American countries were talking about the influence of their cultural background in their expression of gender and sexuality (Espín, 1984, 1987a). Immigrant women were talking about the losses and gains brought about by the acculturation process (Espín, 1987b). Basically, we were talking together in the therapy hour about processes which were not “psychological” according to traditional theory. My gut reaction told me that such issues were at the core of these women’s emotional lives as they had been at the core of mine.

When a prospective client called me saying she wanted a Spanish-speaking therapist because “her problems were in Spanish,” I knew there was a silence about the importance of language in therapy that needed to be broken. When a student of mine was told that he needed to compare his data about the identity development of Latino boys with a comparable group of Anglo boys in order to make his research valid, I knew there was a silence about biases in research that needed to be broken. When the sexuality of both lesbian and heterosexual Latinas was either omitted or misinterpreted by well-intentioned writers, I knew there was a silence that needed to be broken. When the traumatic experiences of refugee and immigrant women were described as individual pathology, I knew there was a silence to be broken. Traditional psychology could not “hear” the fundamental experiences of the people I encountered in my practice and research. Neither scientific inquiry nor clinical practice provided a means for me to more fully respond to my clients’ experiences, my students’ need, and my research “subjects.” “Scientific knowledge” had to be detached from any suspicion of “political activism.” Clinical practice that did not conform to traditional methods was probably an expression of dangerous countertransference. And many of my students thought that a professor who spoke with an accent probably could not think without one.

The students I was training could not work with clients who did not “believe” in therapy, whose values and life experiences did not fit their own. Whatever literature there was at the time concerning ethnic minority populations, with rare exceptions, referred only to “the culturally disadvantaged” with a focus on ways of making those people “catch up” with “mainstream” American society by letting go of their “culture of poverty.” Bilingualism was mentioned only as a difficulty in treatment. Homosexuality was, of course, mental illness, and women were not really healthy adults. People who did not fit traditional mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword, Lillian Comas-Díaz
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Experience as a Source of Theory and Method
• Part 2 Feminist Psychology and Psychotherapy
• Part 3 Sexuality
• Part 4 Immigrant Women and Adolescents
• Part 5 The Interplay of Migration and Sexuality in Women’s Lives
• About the Author