The idea is that you can discuss your issues without filtering them through what your perception of the therapist is.
e.g. If you know that your therapist is a Christian mother of three, you might hold back on how your mother in law is pressuring you to have more children for religious reasons and you think its bullshit. The issue the therapist wants to deal with is your relationship with the in-laws, not whether she agrees on a moral basis with the in-laws.
Therapists need to have a very hard line between personal and professional for their own reasons as well. It is not a business where you want to be mixing different parts of your life.
For these reasons it is a reasonable effort to try and remove as much of yourself as possible from the counselling relationship.
It's not that the therapist doesn't exist in context, its that who the therapist is shouldn't influence the way you present to the therapist.
However, I imagine most people wouldn't believe that, and it's probably not true either. Therapists are humans.
Of course, this kind of raises the question: So therapists have their own biases and we're just blinding ourselves to which ones they have? Is that actually an improvement? (Cf. the koan where Sussman says "I am wiring a neural net randomly because I don't want it to have any preconceptions".)
Perhaps the therapist having to pretend she has no background actually kind of helps her disconnect from it. A kind of theatre. (And maybe the brain having a habit of "when in this office talking with patients, don't connect anything to your real life" is useful.) But I would still wonder if it would work better to bring the issue into the open, and say "Well, I do have this background, which might lead me to think x, but I will consciously try to counteract that." Perhaps there are cases where this second strategy is indeed better (if the patient comes in thinking "I expect almost everyone to be prejudiced against me", and the psychiatrist says "Well, you're right, but I have lots of practice in noticing my prejudices and setting them aside, and it is a point of professional pride for me to do that"), but most of the time it's just faster and less distracting to not mention the issue at all.
Therefore, it's easier for the patient not to know the therapist-as-a-person.
There's ironically a good example of this in the blog post:
"For you, the day [I burned] your village was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday."
Therapists can have race, gender, and age in the same way that it can be Tuesday. They just can't have race in the sense of having their village burned.
(And FWIW, it's very difficult to have an effective blog devoid of emotional content. I tried once and got accused of being a Markov Chain.)
If you don’t know the person all that well, it’s plain to see.
You don't know the person that well.
I don't know what fraction of patients project their abusive boyfriend onto their therapist. That honestly sounds like an account of Freudian psychotherapy from 100 years ago.
If I was to seek therapy for myself, I would actively seek a therapist who looked and sounded likely to help me. I would hope to have a conversation with them about their background, their experiences, and their familiarity with my culture. If I come from, say, India, I would want the therapist to understand my relationship with my parents, instead of medicalizing it.
And if I did walk into a therapist's office and find it barren and grey, and the therapist completely and utterly avoidant of any personal topics... Well, that would remind me of getting polygraphed at the NSA Friendship Annex just outside the BWI airport, by a cold and hostile interviewer. That's not a fun experience.
And a therapists goal is to feel like that person for all of their prospective clients, ideally. The less you can pigeonhole them into social/religious/political/etc boxes the better, from this point of view.
I'm sure some therapists believe it is both, and that they are some kind of universal therapists.
I assume these are the therapists I hear about from friends and online acquaintances when they describe a therapist as friendly, approachable, but ultimately both clueless and hopeless.
I have mostly heard this kind of feedback from non-white and LGBT friends, for what it's worth.
It seems to me that your implication is that by therapists skewing white and non-LGBT, it becomes harder for patients to open up. Either the patient has some prejudice they can't get past, or the therapist is actually entirely clueless as to the patient's lived existence. The only way around this would seem to be having more non-white and LGBT therapists.
But even with this problem, does it not still make sense to reduce the number of identity facets? The more variables there are, the harder it becomes to find a match, especially for those having a hard time as it is.
I don't know of any therapist that doesn't have a specialty and figuring it out is required before you get licensed by the state (CA) simply due to the different licenses available.
There's an undeniable undercurrent of racism if the goal is for the therapist to be a blank white slate for their client, but you misunderstand the goal. The goal, in being a blank slate, is for the client to be comfortable expressing themselves. The therapist, as a professional, is working on behalf of their client and can't let personal opinions that conflict with the client's beliefs come to bear, except in the most exceptional of cases when someone is in imminent danger.
If the client is scared, to the point of not being able to bring it up, that their therapist will judge them and yell at them and verbally abuse them, therapy won't work. If I hate 'lesswrong' and think its stupid, but yet my therapist has built their online presence and career on it (as SSC has), merely knowing my therapist's beliefs on the matter will pollute any response I could have. A good professional therapist can detach their personal opinion of 'lesswrong' from the client's need to rant, and the theraputic value in helping the client figure out their underlying feelings and possible trauma, and to NOT engage with the concept itself. Thus, by not knowing a therapists personal views on every possible thing they might tweet about, this is achievable. If not achievable, then at the very least, worth striving for, for the client's sake. The therapist's goal is to heal the client. The therapist's opinion on misc topics is irrelevant to healing the client.
Is it reasonable? Therapists go to school for years and practice for hundreds of hours, to pursuit of that goal. Some are more successful than others, and still, falling in love and transference - by therapist or client, is simply an occupation hazard.
HOWEVER. This is not the same as saying the therapist needs to not be a human being, otherwise we might as well have therapy by texting an AI (Note to VCs: I know it's stupidly tempting, now's not the time, GPT-3 and ML models a therapist do not make). It's incredibly important, on a personal level, that you find a therapist who specializes in the kind of work you need to do on yourself, in a compatible way, and has some level of similar lived experience.
If I have to explain what the word "woke" means to my therapist wile I'm working through racism in my personal life, that's just not going to work. If I have to explain to my therapist, why being asked to touch my hair, or being told "smile, it makes you prettier", is rage-inducing, it's really just not going to work.
Find a therapist that's like you - in looks, and gender identity+orientation because therapy needs that commonality to serve the client well, but also recognize that's easier said than done.
To the point it's almost regulation via their ethics codes, that they take a test on made by the 'board' of psychology. It's definitely an industry norm. I found out 'the board' is mostly equivalent to Psychologist DMV and is run by the state, and is about as pleasant to interact with.
The fact that this thread went downhill immediately does indicate this might be a really good guideline.
I wasn't trying to be rude, I legitimately think that the rest of that paragraph was a really good answer to his question.
It’s why the guideline is so brilliant, imho.
It is showing us something that isn’t obvious.
You are being well meaning, but there’s something about the question ‘did you read ...’ that gets people going when they are maybe on the fence about how combative they want to be.
Is that the theory you were trying to validate with your question?
Some people sure are eager to project onto Scott's words the wrong ways they're sure he's thinking.
The therapist has some perceived race, gender, and age. They dress a certain way. They have a certain accent when speaking. Patients may prefer a male or female therapist, or a therapist who shares some other background with them. Patients probably want the confidence that their therapist will not dismiss their concerns and will actually help them make progress.
At this point calling the relationship a "blank slate" seems delusional. Sure, maybe the therapist is such a perfect mimic that they're not actually female, middle-aged, Black, or have experience working with trans patients. Maybe this is all just a mirage projected by their professionalism. Maybe there is no therapist, and I'm just sitting on a couch alone, in an empty room.