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Darragh Sheehan
30 May 2025
As the private practice mental health marketplace expands, psychotherapists face increasing pressure to market themselves on websites, social media platforms, and professional listservs. In doing so, most therapists are inadvertently forced or intentionally trying to commodify themselves as a personal "brand[1]". As such, in today's identitarian[2] and narcissistic culture, therapists are pushed to present themselves as affirming and understanding to "sell" themselves as "good objects".
This professional "branding" ranges from the less problematic display of clinical specialties (diagnoses, issues, and modalities) to more concerning disclosures of personal experiences, identities, lifestyles, trauma histories, political views, hobbies, and increasingly, therapist’s own psychiatric diagnoses as well as selfies. Most of these disclosures seem to demonstrate "authenticity" and "empathic capacity". Whether on Psychology Today, Instagram, individual/group practice websites, or directories like "Kink Aware Professionals", this curated self-presentation often aims to attract patients who recognize aspects of themselves in the therapist or group practice.
Therapists who adopt identitarian approaches are often consciously guided by good intentions and the desire to create safer therapeutic spaces for marginalized communities that have historically been excluded, misattuned to, or even harmed by the field. These efforts are important; however, many of the more overtly affirming and identity-centered approaches to therapy, fueled by the logic of online branding and marketability, appear to be overcorrections of these problems.
As psychotherapy becomes increasingly commodified and sought after on online markets, a form of professional splitting emerges between the therapists who engage in identity-based branding and those who do not. Meaning when a therapist brands themself as a professional who "gets it" (by using their identity), they explicitly or implicitly suggest that other therapists (often without that identity or lifestyle, etc.) don’t. This is fostering an increasingly competitive and market-driven ethos within the field, making it so that most clinicians feel more and more pressured to demonstrate to patients that they, too, "get it".
The desire to seek out a therapist who shares specific identity markers or subcultural affiliations can be understood as a wish to be mirrored, and possibly the need to idealize another. Idealizing the therapist early in treatment can unconsciously help patients manage feelings of rage, mistrust, or ambivalence, and also provide a sense of containment, especially before deeper affective material emerges. This is a natural and essential aspect of the therapeutic process, which reflects the therapist's skill in cultivating a therapeutic alliance or what is called basic trust.
Needless to say, establishing trust is crucial for effective therapy; however, when the therapist preloads the therapeutic process or curates the initial transference via branding with mirroring, sameness, affirmation, personal disclosures, and an identitarian emphasis, we need to critically analyze how this impacts not only the clinical relationship but also the way contemporary psychotherapy is being practiced. In other words, What does it mean for clinical practice when from the get-go the therapist symbolically says: "I will be able to understand and support you better because I fuck like you", or "You’re safer here because I am like you: politically, culturally, neurologically, etc".
While safety is essential for therapeutic work, the process itself is inherently risky. This is because true transformation challenges our defenses and often feels anything but safe. Yet, the emphasis on "sameness" in the therapeutic relationship has become implicitly tied to notions of "safety" and/or the idea that someone who shares your identity or lifestyle is inherently less likely to cause harm. This stance, however, unintentionally reinforces the illusion that understanding does not come through difference or alterity (meaning "otherness" or the state of being other), but rather through "sameness" (via identification or ego-syntonic experiences). In this way, "similarity" by implication is equated or positioned as “safe” and, ultimately, that which "heals".
For many individuals or communities who have been socially and politically marginalized or oppressed, the desire for a therapist who personally "gets it" reflects a valid developmental and social need for recognition and attunement. But, when this translates into the therapist positioning themselves primarily as a reassuring identity-affirming mirror, rather than as a distinct other/person, the practice of psychotherapy risks becoming a space where both the "unknown" and difference are suppressed or "sanitized". This invites us to ask: What is happening to psychotherapy at large when "the psychotherapist" is not positioned as a "symbolic other", (meaning, an other who can help metabolize unformulated or disavowed aspects of the self), but rather a mirror that will affirm the patient's already existing self-perception?
Contemporary psychotherapy practices and marketing thereof that equate "alikeness" with safety might inadvertently be contributing to the co-creation of a 'progressive discourse' that frames "otherness" and difference as inherently threatening. While likely unintentional, this framing stems from prioritizing emotional safety in ways that align it with familiarity, ingroup homogeneity, and/or ideological agreement. Needless to say, it is highly ironic that 'progressive' spaces which champion "diversity" may also be reinforcing ideas that equate the unfamiliar as unsafe or undesirable, or differing identities or perspectives with emotional threat. In doing so, this discourse may inadvertently contribute to the deepening of social, cultural, and political divides, under the guise of promoting 'psychological safety' and the steadily commodified language of 'mental health awareness'. Ultimately, psychotherapy—often seen as a social good in progressive circles—may also play a role in advancing narratives that weaken collective political action.
The commodification of therapy, along with evolving cultural narratives, is reshaping how psychotherapy engages with 'identity', as it is increasingly becoming an emotionally and morally charged organizing principle. This reality risks turning the practice of psychotherapy into a process where identity is emotionally valenced. With this framework, identities are positioned as stable and inherently affirmable constructs. Yet, this framing runs counter to a psychoanalytic perspective, which does not view identity as fixed or fully knowable, nor even affirmable, but rather as inherently unresolved, never knowable, and conflicted.
In The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice, the psychoanalyst Karen Maroda (2022) suggests therapists’ personality traits are often rooted in early developmental experiences...
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[1] In the realm of public relations, branding is related to "managing perception" and focuses on how something looks or feels over what’s actually happening...
[2] Identitarianism refers to a political or cultural orientation that centers on fixed identity categories...
[3] Prior to developing the concept independently, I was unaware of the term "branded self" being used elsewhere in the academic literature...
Aaryan, A. (n.d.). The Imaginary, social media, and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”. Medium. https://medium.com/@ayush0.0aryan/the-imaginary-social-media-and-lacans-the-mirror-stage
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press.
Berger, A. A. (2019). Brands and cultural analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Cushman, P. (1990). Why the self is empty: Toward a historically situated psychology. The Psychotherapy Patient, 7(1–2), 35–51.
Lorde, A. (1984). Age, race, class, and sex: Women redefining difference. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (pp. 114–123). Crossing Press.
Maroda, K. J. (2022). The analyst's vulnerability: Impact on Theory and Practice. Routledge.
Original Article Link:
https://alfiesbown.wixstudio.com/mysite/post/the-therapist-as-the-good-enough-commodity-from-holding-to-selling
About the Author:
Darragh Sheehan is a clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and adjunct lecturer at Silberman School of Social Work (City University of New York) from New York City. She has been in direct practice for over 15 years in community mental health. Her primary post-graduate training is in a neo-Reichian somatically oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy. She is a co-director of the Center for Critical and Clinical Analysis. To find out more visit
cccacommunity.com