Ilene J. Philipson

Background

Ilene Philipson was born September 3, 1950, in Los Angeles, California.

Education

Ilene Philipson attended the University of California, where she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in sociology in 1981. She also received a Doctor of Philosophy in clinical psychology at Wright Institute in 1991.

Career

Ilene Philipson is a clinical psychologist, sociologist, and writer. She was an educator and an affiliate scholar of the Beatrice M. Bain Research Group at the Center for Working Families of the University of California Center for the Study of Social Change in Berkeley. Moreover, Philipson served as a staff psychologist at Pacific Applied Psychology Associates and taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and New York University. She is currently a training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles.

Philipson is a former editor of the Socialist Review. She has written a biography of Ethel Rosenberg and co-edited an anthology of socialist-feminist writings. She has also contributed two books to the growing body of literature on women in the workforce, which include an exploration of the issues surrounding the rapid increase in the number of female psychotherapists and a study on how people become too emotionally attached to their jobs. Besides, Philipson's work appeared in numerous periodicals, including Fortune, Fast Company, San Francisco Chronicle, and Oakland Tribune.

Ilene Philipson's first book, Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths, is a fascinating personal biography, using important information gathered from people who knew Ethel Rosenberg. She does not offer any definitive answers or judgments on the controversy surrounding her subject's life and death but offers a deeper understanding of her subject's personality, beliefs, and actions. The book tells a story about Rosenberg, who was accused of being a communist spy and executed in 1953 with her husband, Julius.

Philipson co-edited her next book, Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination: A socialist-feminist Reader, with Karen Hansen, who also served as an editor at the Socialist Review. In the mid-1980s, the two had edited a series of articles with Vicki Smith titled Socialist Feminism Today, and many of those articles appear in their 1990 anthology. Philipson and Hansen's book documents the intellectual history and political developments that evolved into second-wave socialist feminism, examining the growing ideological split between radical feminists and their socialist sisters, who had an uneasy relationship with the male-dominated New Left. Despite the ideological tension inherent in socialist feminism, Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination carefully outline its contributions to larger feminist debates, including reproductive rights and deliberations on the family.

Shortly after the anthology was published, Philipson received her second doctoral degree. Since then, her writing has focused more on psychology and psychotherapy. Her third book, On the Shoulders of Women: The Feminization of Psychotherapy, explores the influx of women practitioners into the field and questions the growing gender imbalance, the decrease in the occupation's status and pay, and the effect on practitioners. Although Philipson admires the distinction women have received in the field, she worries that its feminization is more reflective of a general devaluation of caregiving, and the cultural assignment of women to this arena, than a sign of progress. Tracing the development of psychotherapy from World War II onwards, Philipson documents the burgeoning field's success during the 1960s and subsequent stymieing during the 1980s, when federal funds for mental health services became cut. Despite the decreasing demand for psychotherapists, schools are churning out psychology graduates at a growing rate, and the majority of these newcomers are women. Philipson examines how this phenomenon has affected the field's intellectual and theoretical traditions.

In the book, Married to the Job: Why WeLive to Work and What We Can Do About It, Ilene Philipson examines how the workplace has become more and more important to workers' emotional lives, tracing the trend back to the notion that emotional ties are a sign of weakness and that the workplace can substitute for the intimacy of the family. Philipson notes that the notion is mistaken. She illustrates how workers can feel let down, abandoned, and traumatized when the work environment fails them - a feeling of betrayal that occurs more frequently among women.

Achievements

• Ilene Philipson is well known as a writer, educator, and psychologist. She taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz and Berkeley, and New York University. She is currently the author of four writings. In addition to writing books, Philipson's work appeared in numerous periodicals, including Fortune, Fast Company, San Francisco Chronicle, and Oakland Tribune.

Works

More photos

• book

  • On the Shoulders of Women

    (While men and women used to enter the field of psychother...)

    1993
  • Married to the Job

    (In Married to the Job, clinical psychologist Ilene Philip...)

    2002
  • Ethel Rosenberg

    (Ilene Philipson's biography of Ethel Rosenberg, only the ...)

    1988
  • Women, Class, and the Feminist Imagination 1990

Views

As a psychologist, Ilene Philipson faced workers who have tried to do what so many others in the United States to be attempting to achieve daily - to satisfy unmet emotional needs through their jobs. Perhaps these women and men tried a little too hard, had a surfeit of needs, too few internal resources, to begin with, untempered naivete, too great a belief in the American dream of success and salvation through work. However, they are on a continuum with most of the people who choose longer hours, take fewer vacations, and wake up and go to sleep at night thinking about their jobs. Philipson wants to help them see that work is not life - surprisingly, an increasingly radical notion at the beginning of the new millennium.

Membership

• 

  Ilene Philipson is a co-chair of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Web Seminar Committee.

  International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy , United States

Connections

Ilene Philipson married Jim Stockinger.

husband:

Jim Stockinger

colleague:

Karen V. Hansen

Karen Hansen teaches sociology and women's and gender studies at Brandeis University.