Max Littman, LCSW
May 3, 2025
The mental health field, like many domains of knowledge and innovation, has long been shaped by the Great Man Theory: the idea that a handful of brilliant, singular figures are responsible for groundbreaking discoveries. These figures are overwhelmingly white, male, and Western. While many have contributed meaningful insights, their ideas often emerged in dialogue with, or in unacknowledged proximity to, older, non-Western, Indigenous, and communal traditions of healing and understanding. Some borrowed directly. Others arrived at frameworks that parallel ancient philosophies. But the tendency to center, amplify, and resource white male voices while overlooking the deep wells of ancestral and collective wisdom they draw from is not accidental. It reflects a broader cultural pattern rooted in invisible white supremacist norms about who holds authority, whose voices are legitimized, and what gets remembered as original.
This isn’t about erasure or vilification. Figures like John Bowlby, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Richard Schwartz, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté, Carl Rogers, Peter Levine, and Stephen Porges have undeniably shaped contemporary understandings of attachment, trauma, the psyche, and healing for the betterment of many people. But interrogating how their ideas rose to prominence, while others remained invisible, is part of telling a fuller story of the field. It also allows us to question what kinds of knowledge are too often excluded, and why.
As a white, cisgender man myself, I have been shaped by and have benefited from many of these dynamics. My voice is more likely to be seen as credible, my work more readily received in professional spaces, and my ideas more easily resourced, whether or not that reflects the depth or originality of my contribution. This is part of what compels me to write this: not to center myself, but to acknowledge the ways in which even critical voices like mine can unintentionally reinforce the very hierarchies we hope to interrupt.
How Did This Emphasis on White Men in Theory and Practice Happen?
The prioritization of white male theorists isn’t coincidental. It’s the result of generations of institutional, cultural, and colonial power shaping what gets counted as legitimate knowledge. Western academic, publishing, and professional institutions, built by and for white men, have long defined whose insights are worth funding, teaching, and scaling. Meanwhile, Black, Indigenous, and non-Western frameworks have been dismissed, extracted from without attribution, or quietly omitted from mainstream education and professional discourse.
The result is a narrow psychological canon, often rooted in individualism and framed through Western assumptions about the mind and self. These frameworks rarely consider communal, systemic, or historical trauma as core to mental, emotional, and physical life. Instead, they position healing as a personal endeavor, stripped from the social and cultural containers that many global traditions see as essential.
This doesn’t mean white male theorists didn’t contribute something real. But their rise to prominence happened in a cultural ecology that made it far easier for their voices to be heard, funded, published, institutionalized, and cited, while others remained on the margins.
How Elevation Happens: A Closer Look Behind the Scenes
To understand how white, cis male voices continue to dominate the field, even in subtle, well-intentioned ways, it helps to look at what happens behind the scenes. These dynamics often unfold quietly, abstractly, and in ways that are hard to interrupt unless we name them explicitly:
- Initial Access to Resources and Training
White men, especially those who are cis and come from class privilege, are more likely to have had early access to the kinds of graduate programs, time, and financial support that allow for deep study, research, and authorship. They are less likely to be juggling multiple jobs or facing systemic barriers just to enter the field. - Presumed Authority and Likeability
In academic and clinical spaces, white cis male voices are often unconsciously granted credibility. Their ideas are more likely to be heard without being questioned, their confidence interpreted as expertise rather than entitlement. When they speak with certainty, it’s often welcomed. When others do, it can be seen as threatening or aggressive. - Publishing and Platforming Bias
Editorial boards, podcast hosts, keynote organizers, and CEU gatekeepers often favor names they already know; names that have been cited in their graduate syllabi, already published in major journals, or already endorsed by big institutions. This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. Visibility becomes credential. - Erasure Through Framing
Even when white men name non-Western influences, the way their work is framed often centers them as the synthesizer or innovator. The traditions they pull from become background texture: spiritual inspiration, not intellectual lineage. The deeper cultural frameworks are reduced to metaphor while their frameworks are elevated as models. - Deeper Pocketbooks and Media Savvy
Many white male clinicians or theorists have the economic privilege to hire publicists, write books with ample editing support, build online platforms, and attend or speak at expensive conferences, all of which increase reach and influence. - Well-Meaning Imitation and Over-Citation
Therapists and clinicians who care about social justice often continue citing and teaching from dominant voices simply because those are the names they were trained on. Without curiosity, effort, and intentionality, even progressive spaces can unconsciously reinforce existing hierarchies by continuing to quote the same theorists without exploring who else is doing, and has long been doing, similar or deeper work. - Repackaging and Branding
Ideas that have existed for centuries are often repackaged into models, acronyms, or methods by white male clinicians. These models are then marketed as “new” or “cutting-edge,” while the community-based traditions they mirror are treated as informal or spiritual, not scientific.
These dynamics are not always visible. But they add up. Over time, they create a field where it feels like the most trusted or revolutionary ideas are all coming from white, male figures, even when this is not true. Interrupting this pattern requires an intentional shift in who we cite, how we teach, and what we uplift.
The Problem with “Evidence-Based” as the Gold Standard
In much of the mental health field, scientific study, particularly randomized controlled trials and peer-reviewed journal publications, is positioned as the highest form of knowledge. The term “evidence-based” has become synonymous with legitimacy, safety, and effectiveness. But this framing often reflects a narrow and Western-centric view of what counts as knowledge and who gets to produce it.
Many healing traditions—oral, communal, embodied, spiritual, intergenerational—do not translate easily into double-blind studies or decontextualized data points. Their wisdom lives in ritual, relationship, and lived experience. When we privilege evidence-based models to the exclusion of other forms of knowing, we risk erasing entire lineages of healing that have supported communities for centuries.
This doesn’t mean research is irrelevant. But it does mean we should question what kinds of knowledge get studied, what kinds don’t, and who decides. Evidence-based models are often developed in controlled settings with mostly white participants, measured against Eurocentric norms, and held up as universal. Meanwhile, Indigenous and non-Western practices are dismissed as anecdotal, spiritual, or unscientific until they are repackaged by someone with institutional backing, typically led or established by white men.
Reclaiming pluralism in the field means allowing many forms of evidence to count: clinical intuition, cultural legacy, body-based knowing, spiritual insight, and community outcomes. No single framework can hold the whole truth. When we position science as the sole gatekeeper of legitimacy, we risk reproducing the same hierarchies that contribute to the individual and collective wounds that we are tending to.
The Women Who Helped Shape the Field But Weren’t Always Cited
While white male figures dominate the psychological canon, many women, especially women of color, have made foundational contributions that have often gone underacknowledged. Some were collaborators who were later minimized. Others were pioneers in their own right, writing and practicing outside of dominant institutions and being overlooked as a result.
Mary Ainsworth’s work, for instance, was critical to the development of attachment theory, yet Bowlby is the name most often remembered. Karen Horney challenged Freud’s deeply patriarchal assumptions and offered an early feminist perspective on the psyche, but her contributions are rarely highlighted outside psychoanalytic circles. Lillian Comas-Díaz has worked at the intersection of culture, race, and trauma for decades. Laura Brown has been a voice for feminist therapy and the integration of intersectionality in clinical practice. Yet these names are far less likely to appear on graduate syllabi or keynote lineups.
This erasure is compounded when we consider that many BIPOC women, queer women, and nonbinary healers have created entire models and movements, from community healing circles to liberation psychology, that remain excluded from mainstream frameworks. Their work often centers relationality, social context, and systemic harm, elements still treated as secondary in much of Western psychology.
Re-centering these voices isn’t just about fairness. It’s about depth and accuracy. A mental health field that sidelines the contributions of women, especially those who work outside white institutional norms, is missing some of the most innovative, liberatory, and humanizing wisdom available.
Re-centering Broader Wisdom Traditions
Each of the following well-known figures is often celebrated for groundbreaking contributions. But their insights can be contextualized within a wider and often older web of thought, practice, and communal knowledge:
Attachment and John Bowlby
Bowlby’s attachment theory, refined alongside Mary Ainsworth, is credited with “discovering” how secure relational bonds shape development. But Indigenous communities across the globe have long emphasized collective caregiving and emotional attunement. The Māori, the !Kung, and the Lakota Sioux offer examples of child-rearing that rely on relational webs, not nuclear dyads, to form secure attachment.
Jung, Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious
Jung’s archetypes and the idea of a collective unconscious mirror teachings from Yoruba Ifá cosmology, Buddhist karma and samskara, and Hindu Upanishadic philosophy. These systems describe shared psychological and spiritual patterns that predate Jung by centuries, if not millennia.
Freud and the Structure of the Psyche
Freud’s model of the psyche—id, ego, and superego—has clear parallels in Plato’s tripartite soul: reason, spirit, and appetite. Jewish mysticism and Buddhist philosophy also describe layered selves and internal tensions. Frantz Fanon, building on and challenging Freud, expanded the framework to include colonial trauma and racialized oppression, realities Freud never addressed.
Richard Schwartz and Internal Family Systems
IFS resonates with Tibetan Buddhist inner parts work, the Dagara people’s understanding of internal energies, and Indigenous models that see the self as plural, relational, and embedded within ancestral lines. While Schwartz codified a modern therapeutic method, the idea of multiplicity, and the sacredness of internal dialogue, is not new.
Bessel van der Kolk and Trauma
Van der Kolk helped popularize the role of the body in trauma recovery, but somatic healing has always been central in non-Western approaches. Ritual movement, drumming, breathwork, and collective ceremony have long helped communities in Africa, South Asia, and Indigenous cultures metabolize trauma and restore balance to the body-mind.
Gabor Maté and Addiction
Maté reframes addiction as a response to pain rather than a personal failure, echoing longstanding community-based healing traditions. The Native American Wellbriety Movement, African spiritual interventions, and other Indigenous practices have long treated addiction as a relational and spiritual wound. Carl Hart’s work furthers this by challenging pathologizing narratives rooted in Western moralism and racial bias.
Carl Rogers and Person-Centered Therapy
Rogers emphasized empathy, unconditional positive regard, and the innate drive for growth. These values align with Buddhist compassion practices, Indigenous storytelling traditions, and African-centered psychologies like Optimal Psychology. Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness expands on this, offering a more layered, culturally situated understanding of becoming.
Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing
Levine’s model brought renewed attention to how trauma lives in the nervous system and how healing involves completing thwarted survival responses. But this truth has long been embodied in ancestral knowledge. Practices like the San people’s trance dance, Amazonian healing rituals, and East African communal shaking ceremonies all recognize the body’s capacity to discharge trauma through movement, rhythm, and breath. Levine integrated these understandings with Western science, but the wisdom is far older than the framework.
Stephen Porges and Polyvagal Theory
Porges’ Polyvagal Theory redefined our understanding of the autonomic nervous system, emphasizing the social nervous system and how safety, connection, and threat are neurobiologically encoded. But this mapping of physiological states onto relational experience echoes long-standing wisdom in many cultures. Yogic and Taoist traditions have long described the breath, vagus nerve, and energy centers as gateways to regulation and connection. Indigenous practices, such as rhythmic chanting, breath-focused ceremony, and co-regulatory touch, have always understood that healing happens not just cognitively, but through safety, rhythm, and attuned presence in the body.
Everyday Reinforcement
These dynamics aren’t limited to institutions, publications, or keynote stages. Clinicians, often unintentionally, reproduce these hierarchies in quiet, everyday ways. It might show up in who we cite in a workshop. Whose books we assign in a study group. Which voices we quote in a client session or consultation. Who we follow, share, and amplify on social media. Whose trainings we consider “advanced,” and whose we see as “niche.”
It also lives in the stories we tell about where our insights come from. When we say we “just had a sense” of something that came from a deeper lineage we’ve absorbed but haven’t traced. When we use frameworks rooted in non-Western, Indigenous, or feminist traditions without naming them. When we refer to white men as “the founders” or “the originators” without acknowledging the intellectual and spiritual ecosystems they drew from, often without attribution.
These patterns also make their way into the therapy room.
We may use language or frameworks that implicitly position Western psychology as the “real” model, and spiritual, cultural, or ancestral practices as secondary or symbolic. We might gently pathologize a client’s desire to engage in communal healing, ancestral rituals, or spiritual work that doesn’t align with the dominant therapeutic frame. We might privilege insight and verbal processing over movement, song, prayer, or relational energy, subtly guiding clients toward Western norms of selfhood, healing, and expression.
Even when using liberatory or progressive models, we may unconsciously center white male voices as the “safe” or “neutral” authorities. We may cite Porges or Levine when talking about the nervous system, but not the Yoruba understanding of breath and energy. We may teach clients parts work through Schwartz’s language while missing the chance to connect it to the pluralistic cosmology they already live inside.
Interrupting these patterns isn’t about performative inclusion or guilt-driven gestures. It’s about recalibrating toward truth. It’s about tending to the therapeutic field and our relationships within it with more integrity. It’s about knowing that what we amplify shapes what gets remembered, resourced, and replicated. What we model in the room shapes how clients relate to their own knowing, to their communities, and to their sense of what healing is allowed to look like.
How to Interrupt with Integrity
Here are a few ways we can move toward that integrity:
- Expand your lens. Read, listen to, and learn from frameworks rooted in Black, Indigenous, feminist, queer, and global traditions, not as add-ons, but as core contributions to the field.
- Diversify your citations. Whether in teaching, writing, supervision, or client work, notice whose ideas you reference and whose you leave unnamed. Make intentional room for underacknowledged voices.
- Name your influences honestly. If a model you use parallels ancestral or community-based traditions, say so. Share where it echoes other ways of knowing, even if it wasn’t taught to you that way.
- Challenge expertise hierarchies. Just because someone hasn’t published a book or given a TED Talk doesn’t mean their wisdom is less valid. Listen to clinicians, elders, peers, and cultural workers who practice outside dominant institutions.
- Hold complexity. Celebrate what’s valuable in dominant models while being willing to examine how power shaped their prominence. Curiosity and critique can coexist.
This kind of attunement isn’t just about academic fairness. It supports healing. When we widen the circle of who is seen as wise, we make more space for clients, and ourselves, to locate healing in places we may have been conditioned to ignore. We begin to repair collective rupture. We start to dismantle internalized hierarchies about who gets to know, who gets to heal, and who gets to lead.
Why This Matters
This isn’t about invalidating the contributions of white male theorists. It’s about context, integrity, and equity. It’s about noticing how systems of power shape what gets remembered and what gets erased. It’s about challenging epistemic injustice: the cultural tendency to only validate knowledge when it is presented through white, Western, institutional lenses.
By interrupting the Great Man narrative, we begin to restore something vital. We start honoring the global, ancestral, and collective sources of healing wisdom that have shaped humanity for millennia. We begin building a field that reflects the full truth: that healing has never been the domain of a few. It has always been held in the many.
For feedback and comments, I can be reached at max@maxlittman.com.
I provide private practice mentorship, consultation, and therapist/practitioner part intensives.
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References
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