Abstract
This study investigated what it is like to be a feminist clinical psychologist in a country with a long commitment to gender equality. We studied how two Swedish clinical child psychologists committed to promoting gender equality talked about issues of gender and inequality in their clinical work. We identified three interpretative repertoires that formed the basis of these clinicians' talk about gender and gender equality: a repertoire built on ideas about basic inherent differences between boys and girls, but nonetheless valuing boys and girls equally; a repertoire emphasizing similar treatment, built on the assumption that gender is of no importance, and that everybody has equal value; and a repertoire built on views of girls and boys as unequally valued by society at large. Both clinicians drew upon all three repertoires. However, they used the repertoires in starkly different ways depending on whether they assumed that knowledge that presupposes gendered power structures can be considered legitimate professional knowledge.
Keywords
Introduction
What is it like to be a feminist psychologist in Sweden, a country committed to gender equality? This is a question that we—two Swedish feminist psychologists with many years of professional experience—are often asked by colleagues from other countries. In this article we explore issues that face Swedish clinical child psychologists who want to promote gender equality and integrate knowledge about gender issues into their therapeutic work. Child psychologists and therapists in Sweden work in a national context that emphasizes equality between women and men (Gemzöe, 2002; Hirdman, 2001). Sweden has a well-developed public childcare, a gender-neutral parental leave program, gender equality legislation, and regulations for health care that emphasize the impact of societal factors on health (Discrimination Act, 2008; Parental Leave Act, 1995; Stockholm County Council, 2006). However, the political concepts “gender equality” and “feminism” often lose their critical potential as they travel into practical arenas such as health care (Eduards, 2002). Psychotherapy is included under the gender equality policy that regulates public health care in Sweden; however, there is little discussion among psychotherapists of how this policy affects the practice of psychotherapy (Stockholm County Council, 2006). 1 The silence in the profession, in contrast to the political emphasis on equality, triggered our interest in how clinical psychologists give meaning to gender equality, gender, and feminism in their therapeutic work.
In a previous article we explored how a number of clinical child psychologists, who were not selected for any interest in gender equality issues, talked about gender and gender equality in their work (Eskner-Skoger, Lindberg, & Magnusson, 2011). The dominant pattern was as follows: When they spoke about their profession generally, gender equality meant gender neutrality, expressing an ideal of the psychologist as value neutral and a reluctance to bring their values into their work. In talk about symptoms and therapeutic practices, they construed gender as difference, arguing that girls and boys have different symptoms, so they should be treated differently. Gender equality issues were not made to seem relevant, nor did the clinicians show concerns about the risk of reinforcing gender stereotypical norms for girls and boys (Eskner-Skoger et al., 2011). However, there were some interviews that diverged on all the above points. These divergences, we felt, merited further study. For this article we selected the only two interviews in which the participants spontaneously expressed an engagement in gender equality issues (an expression that in the Swedish context is equivalent to expressing engagement in feminist issues). We analyzed these interviews in order to explore how clinicians committed to gender equality formulate their critique of gender stereotypes in therapy and also the clinical strategies that their critiques may enable. Further, we wanted to explore whether their expressed commitment to gender equality meant that they regarded knowledge about societal subordination of girls and women as relevant for therapeutic strategies. In other words, in the eyes of two clinicians committed to gender equality (i.e. feminism), what kinds of knowledge about gender, feminism, and gender equality could be legitimately brought to bear on clinical work?
We were inspired by earlier feminist studies of dominant ways of conceptualizing gender in psychology (Burman, 1994, 2008; Crawford & Marecek, 1989; Diamond, 2006). Feminist critics have argued that an important reason for the limited integration of feminist theory and other gender-theoretical understandings into conventional psychology (e.g. developmental psychology) is a divergence between their epistemological allegiances (Marecek, 1995). Of special importance for this study are the consequences for developmental psychology of such a divergence. Code (2000), for instance, argued that in much developmental psychology, an objectivist view of science combines with the ideal of universal knowledge, perpetuating assumptions and practices that may contribute to maintaining social inequalities. Further, Burman (2008) problematized the combination of a universalist aim and an exclusive focus on the individual in many theories of psychological development. She argued that this has led to a failure to theorize the contexts of children's lives.
Research questions
Our aim was to explore the meanings of gender available to Swedish child psychologists who want to promote gender equality in their work as therapists. We asked the following analytical questions: When psychologists who want to promote gender equality talk about their work, what meanings of gender and gender equality do they recruit? In what specific professional contexts does gender become relevant? How does their meaning-making about gender relate to their ideals of a competent practitioner? What are the consequences of different ways of thinking about gender for how clinicians perceive their ability to counteract gender stereotypes?
The interviews
The two interviews were done in 2007. The interviewers contacted managers of public child psychiatry clinics, maternal and child health clinics, and primary schools to recruit clinical psychologists working in those organizations. The managers furnished the names of possible participants; an interest in or knowledge about gender issues and gender equality was not a selection criterion. All the interviews were conducted in the practitioners' workplace. The interviewers presented themselves to participants as licensed psychologists and researchers interested in interviewing psychologists about their therapeutic methods, their views on their role as psychologists, and their view on working with issues of gender and gender equality. 2 Information about protection of anonymity was given at the beginning of the interview. The interviewers aimed for an open and listening stance, encouraging reflections by the participants about their work. The two psychologists whose interviews indicated that they were especially committed to gender equality were chosen for this study. Both were women.
The interview guide
We developed an interview guide that covered five topics: (1) The psychologist's clinical tasks, working methods, and theoretical framework; (2) the types of practical psychological work with families and children that each psychologist engaged in; (3) the participant's views on psychology and psychologists in society; (4) the participant's views on gender and gender equality issues; (5) the participant's reflections on her role as a psychologist. The interview conversations were organized around these five topics, with ample space for the participant to expand on issues that she deemed especially important.
Interview analyses
Our analytical procedures were inspired by critical discursive psychology with its emphasis on words and language use as ongoing sites of negotiation (Wetherell, 1998; 2007). We adopted the analytical approaches developed by Edley (2001) and Wetherell and Potter (1992). They argue that, when people speak, they do so within a framework of existing culturally based arguments and understandings, which they have termed “interpretative repertoires.” Not all understandings and arguments are equally available, however. Consequently, our analyses focus on, first, on how participants position themselves in relation to the different possible understandings, and second, what discursive processes may underlie their positionings. The terms discourse and interpretative repertoire are often used interchangeably to denote patterns of meaning-making and specific ways of talking and thinking about a phenomenon. According to Edley (2001), the term interpretative repertoire tends to be used when researchers want to emphasize people's activities in identity production. Here, we use the term interpretative repertoire to denote the different ways of talking about aspects of clinical psychological work.
Our analytical questions focused on how the two psychologists reflected on their approaches to therapy and their awareness of various meanings of gender. We studied their reflections on the theoretical tools at their disposal as therapists, and how useful they found these tools to be when dealing with the assumptions about gender that surround the clinician. We also explored the knowledge ideals that the participants expressed and whether the ideals seemed to have consequences for the participants' ability to integrate their commitment to gender equality with their therapeutic work. To do this, we mapped the assumptions about gender on which each participant based her commitment to gender equality and observed how these assumptions related to ideals of a proper professional approach. Finally, we studied how the participant's assumptions related to a core question for feminist approaches to psychological treatment: in what circumstances can knowledge about gender, power, and social dominance be counted as legitimate clinical knowledge?
Reading through the two interviews, the first author noted each participant's reflections as they were related to the analytical questions. We then used the full interview transcripts to construct maps of the discursive surroundings in which each participant moved in her daily working life. Following on this, we analyzed the participants' reflections as they tried to reconcile the different, and often contradictory, repertoires and positions that were activated in their attempts to deal with the meanings of gender in the professional setting.
Results and discussion
A first finding was that the two participants used different strategies to justify their commitment to gender-equal therapeutic work. These differences, in turn, seemed to have consequences for their views on gender in therapeutic work. In what follows, we describe and compare their strategies and their consequences. We first describe how the two participants reflected on and argued about gender issues. We then discuss the strategies for reasoning and the discursive tools that the participants drew on.
Participant 1—An uneasy position between positions
In the profession: Women and men are equally professional but asymmetrically valued
This participant worked as a clinical psychologist in a school setting, basing her work mainly on cognitive behavioral theory. She had about five years' work experience. When the interviewer brought up gender issues and gender equality, this participant immediately commented that they were important. When she was asked to reflect on how such matters were dealt with at work, she answered: P
3
: One just takes it for granted that male psychologists are so very much more – I may exaggerate a bit – but it feels as if they are so very much more sought after. Because being a man in a female profession is terrific – “Guys!” Not so much in the other direction: if you were a female truck-driver – “We want her”… but somehow also one takes it for granted that I will also be pleased: “Oh, God, a male psychologist, great! Really good!” Three thousand crowns more per month than me.
In the therapy room (1): Girls and boys are different and given asymmetrical resources
Later, the interviewer probed for reflections on gender and gender equality in relation to therapeutic treatment procedures and the allocation of resources to girls and boys. The participant then told of her impression that professional attention and resources were unequally distributed between boys and girls, and that boys were given support and treatment earlier than girls. She said: P: Well, my spontaneous general feeling, and I don't know if it's correct, but it feels as if one is pretty quick in paying attention to the classics – boys who act out. And girls are left without attention much longer, because their problems don't demand so much from their surroundings, or because they often turn inwards.
In the therapy room (2): Seeing girls and boys as different but valuing them equally
The participant gave several accounts of introverted and silent girls and troublesome, acting-out boys. She sought explanations of the imbalance of resource allocation mainly in inherent differences between girls and boys, not in the societal devaluation of girls. For instance, when asked what happens when girls' introverted patterns create difficulties, she proffered the internally focused explanation that girls' symptoms create the problem, thus focusing on assumed differences between girls and boys (“girls are too quiet”). This disconnection of the unequal resource allocation from the societal devaluation of girls contrasted with her earlier statements about the inequitable salary allocation and societal evaluation of female and male psychologists. When the participant spoke about the girls and boys she saw clinically, the repertoire “similar but unequally valued” was replaced by an approach to speaking about gender that was based in inherent differences between boys and girls. Her own view came across as affirming that boys and girls were different but ought to be given equal resources. We called this repertoire “different and equally valued.” Later, the interviewer broached the possibility of including a societal-level analysis in clinical work: I: Different groups in society have different access to power and resources. Could such power and resource circumstances be of any importance for the psychological problems that you treat? Do you think, in a societal perspective, that those circumstances might have psychological consequences or …? P: Yes. I do. In a way, of course, but it becomes, it is on such an enormous – yes it – on a political level it is, certainly, certainly. P: I think gender equality is important. But I sometimes think, “Stop, that will do now!” That there's, there's sort of too much. And I sometimes also think that one – I really don't think one has to apply a gender perspective to everything, it becomes a bit [sighs]. That's not where the problem is, in a way, I think. No, I don't know. I: How do you mean …? P: Hmm. It, that is to say, the difficult thing is, it's a bit like this – well in principle it [a feminist perspective] is perhaps after all meant to fill the function to be a bit more exploratory. But it becomes – I often think there is a very dogmatic, judgmental tone. That it so to say – there's no unprejudiced inquiry or hypothesis-testing, but it's “Now these bastards are going to get paid for hundreds of years, thousands of years of oppression!”
For this participant, knowledge that begins with an assumption of gendered power structures could not be neutral and therefore cannot fulfill the requirements for a legitimate grounding for professional work. When she spoke about education and professional knowledge, knowledge that was informed by an explicit agenda (such as women's demands to be equally valued) was therefore suspect.
Trying to counteract sex stereotypes using gender-neutral means
This participant did express a wish that the inequalities in the valuation of male and female psychologists, and in the gender-stereotypical approaches to therapy with children, would be rectified. However, because she did not consider it legitimate to interpret inequalities between girls and boys in treatment as due to differential valuing, a value-neutral repertoire about gender seemed to be activated in her accounts of therapy. In this repertoire, also, she spoke from a commitment to gender equality, but reframed gender equality as being treated similarly. For instance, when asked if she sometimes worried that she might contribute to strengthening gender stereotypes in her treatment work, she answered: P: Yes. Though I try, that is, I try not to, I try to think more freely and more widely, to, as it were, be the one who argues for a sort of more gender-neutral approach. So that I hope that I don't actively contribute to painting children into corners.
When, soon after the above passage, the interviewer asked if the participant felt that she had access to resources that helped her avoid getting stuck in gender-stereotypical thinking, she replied: P: What's good about learning theory is that it is very contextual; that there isn't any intrinsic problem or any intrinsic strength in being either the one or the other but it – in relation to one's surroundings and the expectations one is subject to …. Yes, support to the extent that one has to see things in their context, and in what way it makes difficulties for this pupil in this situation …. I: Do you feel then, that you have support for … also daring to be able to go beyond these issues of gender or …? P: Yes, I think so, because that's nothing self-evident. P: You may think, say what you want – I mean things are so incredibly gender equal and yet one talks differently to one's, to little boys and little girls. There is an expectation for how one ought to be as a little girl and a little boy. And I – for as I said that I might react to acting-out girls who don't sort of – for me it is easier to deal with boys who are a little girlish. I think that is nice and sympathetic, but acting-out girls who are boyish, that is sort of: “It's just not done to behave that way!” I, instinctively, I react like that. So, I can sort of intellectually see that it's OK to act in whatever way, that there is neither the one nor the other, or one way is not more right than the other, and yet I react in this way.
A far from gender-neutral practice
In spite of her previously expressed desire to treat girls and boys in the same way, and to ascribe no importance to the sex category of a child, this participant noted that she did react differently to a behavior depending on whether the actor was a boy or a girl. She also noted the disparity between a gender-neutral ideal and a gender-specific treatment approach. However, we found no reflections in her interview on why such a disparity existed or how it might be removed. Further, in her reflections about these disjunctions, which she found “disturbing,” she directed no criticism against the knowledge base of psychology or her training as a psychologist and their treatment of issues of power and gender. Rather, her choice of words (“I, instinctively I react like that”; “and yet I react in this way”) indicates that she seemed to see her reactions as due to her individual shortcomings.
In some of the passages in which she spoke about gender equality, the participant expressed uncertainty and discomfort about how to act “correctly.” In one such passage, talking about her own approach to gender equality, she expressed a sense of not being able to “stand up for it” when things came to a head. She described her own shortcomings in handling asymmetries and injustices and gave vent to reactions of frustration, depression, and fatigue: P: Perhaps one thinks that – of course, gender equality [is important] – but when things come to a head, maybe one doesn't stand up for it, somehow. I: You seem a bit resigned. P: Yes, well, yes, that's what I think, it is double, because it is sort of [sighs] on the one hand there are injustices and then at the same – on the other hand it feels like, well but it's just that it's sort of a part of this large whole to do with how we become the people we become and what it means to be a girl and a woman, sort of. Then it's also, I get completely depressed [laughs] – no, but if one has to know so much, be so much and also keep fighting for things, it gets so exhausting. P: But somehow it feels like – but yes it is – there is some difference that is desirable or sought after in some way. For I am thinking that if there were no difference, if it didn't matter, then it would – then it wouldn't matter if one had only male or female work mates or lived with men or women or – so there is something in the existence of differences that makes things interesting. And yes, no – yes, arrgh!
Participant 2—From gender stereotypes to “elbow room” in therapy
The ill effects of sex-stereotypical expectations on girls
This participant worked in a child psychiatric clinic and had many years of experience of work as a clinical psychologist. Her work was based mainly in a psychodynamic framework but she sometimes drew on cognitive behavioral methods in her work. She explicitly stated her ambition to counteract gender stereotypes in her therapeutic work. When talking about her therapeutic work, she described how she had gradually changed from aiming to adjust her clients' behavior to accord with gender stereotypes to aiming to change gender stereotypes: P: Earlier I would have thought that it was strange, or more strange, that a girl was acting out than that a boy was. I would probably have reasoned just as I thought about myself when I was young, that “That's not done!” Also about shame and guilt and how one may, if one is allowed to, take sexual initiatives and so on. But I don't think now that I value them in that way. I actually see now, when I have been seeing girls who have turned inwards on themselves and deteriorated and become withdrawn. Even a girl I followed for many years, who became psychotic and spent many years in a psychiatric ward. So I think that it is actually a sign of health if girls can be prickly and be angry, and can help themselves. P: So…. I think that long ago, I would have been a little afraid of working with these angry girls, but not afraid of working with angry boys, not at all…. Yes, I remember when I worked at [X residential treatment centre]…, there were drug-dependent girls there, and they really acted out. I remember being quite afraid…. But later I knew. They weren't dangerous…. But they really got into trouble, they did, in this whole thing of being subservient to the boys.
Opening your eyes to power within and outside the therapy room
In this depiction of a residential treatment center for troubled teenagers, after first commenting on her earlier prejudiced attitudes, she noted that she had seen that the same behavior had asymmetrical consequences for girls and boys. This is a typical example from her many accounts of how she learned that sex category made a difference and of how she came to see the power asymmetries that were involved. Another example is her description of what made her begin working with children who had been sexually abused: Well, I think it was because one – there was one girl whom I saw…. And I felt that I didn't understand anything!… But then, as I started seeing other children who, well, who said things and told me, then I began to think, “But I have to learn more about this. I really know nothing about this!” P: But, you know, there were, I saw how they worked there and I thought, “Why do they take …?” I sometimes thought, “How can they imagine that they ought to bring the abuser into the same room as the child?”…. I: They actually did? P: Sometimes they did. Female therapists didn't, it was more men who did. And then later, it was found out that over the years quite a few male care providers who had abused girls had been coming there… for supervision, because they worked in family treatment homes. Eventually this was discovered and several were sentenced to long terms in prison. But there we were, in good faith, thinking that – even if the children were telling things – one thought, “He is such a nice man, he couldn't have done such a thing, god, how they are fantasizing.”…. I: How do you understand this? Do you think in terms of gender, or knowledge, or…? How they could act – P: I think, “How could one have such blinkers on?” But I don't quite think that the blinkers are there today. (I:No.) Fear, ignorance. Sort of like. Or, I haven't felt fear of working with any kind of problem, but I have been ignorant. Many times I have felt “I don't know enough, I really have to learn more.” And open my eyes. P: So, I do think that I work more to make them get tougher, these anxious and timid girls. I get really worried when I work with these kind of withdrawn girls, who say that “I only want a boyfriend, and I don't mind if he makes all the decisions, and I will always be with him, and I will never move from here”. P: I am thinking about two tough young men – boys. They are like that… they may cry, they can feel, and they can – There it may instead be that they have a girlfriend who makes the decisions. I: How do you work then? [laughs] How do you think? P: Well, I try to listen to them, and say, “Is this good for you? Does it make you feel good? Do you think this is okay?” [They reply:] “No, you know, I don't know if it's so good, for I can't …” [I ask:] “How would you like things to be?”, and then they may say, “I would like to play with my band, and exercise with my buddies, but I can't, you know, because she becomes so cross.” [I say:] “Well, but tell me how she is cross, what happens when she becomes cross and what happens with you and how do you deal with the trouble?” And then I can, for instance, work with “the empty chair,” placing her there, and then swapping places, and so on.
This participant did not show any signs of the discomfort that was present in the first participant's interview. Rather, she seemed to have arrived at a position that allowed her to see herself as simultaneously a proper psychologist and a critical feminist who acknowledged societal power asymmetries. What made this possible? One decisive factor may have been her awareness of the paucity of meaningful ways for clinical psychologists to talk about the power dynamics involved in children's mental health problems. We found no indications in her talk of commitment to an ideal of neutral knowledge nor of notions of mental health as divorced from values and power processes. In her interview she recounted numerous experiences that made it legitimate to look outside psychology proper to find additional knowledge. In this process, she seems to have replaced a neutral and individualizing view that is typical of traditional psychology with a contextualizing view typically found in feminist theory and gender studies. This participant did not repudiate psychological methods and theories but seemed to aim to integrate them into a contextualizing framework that takes societal structures into account. Where then, outside psychology, had she found tools to understand that for which she found no tools in psychology? When asked about this, this participant emphasized her long experience of being part of the women's movement: P: I had been part of the women's movement from when it started, in X town … And therefore I brought a little bit of this along with me, because I was socially and politically engaged. I: Tools to understand the situation, in a way? P: Yes. And this had – I noticed that this had – the female psychologist who worked there – they also had those eyes.
Stepping back and concluding
In the two interviews that we have analyzed, we identified two different ways of talking about integrating feminism in clinical work. In the first interview, we saw the participant attempting to integrate awareness about gender issues into a psychological frame of reference. Our analysis showed how her talk moved away from her original stance on gendered societal inequalities into a difference-focused stance. In the second interview, we saw that the participant attempted instead to integrate psychological knowledge into a gender-theoretical frame of reference, enabling critical reflections on clinical work and leading to a desire to change existing power relations through the use of therapy. Both participants expressed difficulties that can be seen as related to the integration of different views of knowledge with their clinical tools. However, they talked in quite different ways about how they dealt with these difficulties. In our view, it is likely that the bases for these differences are to be found in their discursive surroundings.
The first interview was suffused by a belief that it is desirable, or even necessary, for clinicians to draw only on neutral knowledge in their practice. Inserting gender-equality issues into this overarching frame allows the clinician to be interested in furthering gender equality, while still adhering to the ideal of neutral knowledge that is dominant in (developmental) psychology (Code, 2000; Miller & Scholnick, 2000). In conjunction with the shift away from acknowledging the unequal valuation of women and men to instead asserting that gender should be of no importance in therapy, much of the critical impetus of a feminist position was lost. This in turn led to the conclusion that feminism, in the sense of paying attention to asymmetrical social conditions associated with girls and boys, should be left out of therapeutic work. Our interpretation is that the ideal of value-neutral professional knowledge was so dominant and so taken for granted that the alternative of acknowledging injustices in how girls and boys were treated did not appear as a possible choice. This type of reasoning gives a good illustration of how dominant discourses are often so taken for granted that they make other discourses impossible to assume (Gavey, 1989).
Feminist researchers have noted that attempts to change injustices from the inside of such a knowledge ideal put the practitioner in a dilemma: To be a credible professional, one needs to stay within the bounds of “mainstream psychology.” However, the tools offered by the mainstream are insufficient to counteract dominant, hindering, assumptions. The feminist therapists Bruns and Kaschak expressed the dilemma thus: “Feminist researchers and therapists need to take care that they do not fall into the trap of privileging the scientific discourse that values symptom reduction over human connection and meaning making … quick fixes over witness, and privatization of pain over social change” (Bruns & Kaschak, 2010, p. 214).
The second participant had access to different resources. When speaking about the meanings of gender in the life situations of the children she saw in therapy, she drew on the same repertoire as when speaking of herself as a member of her profession: the repertoire “similar and unequally valued.” She told about how her experiences of having failed to help children moved her from a neutral knowledge base to a knowledge base that made power visible. The driving force in this change seemed to have been the insight that the discipline of psychology lacked a language for the experiences of subordination and abuse that she saw as implicated in children's psychological distress. Her repeated experiences of these and other deficiencies of the tools of her profession seem to have spurred her search for a better framework. She found this outside her discipline, in theories and practices that made it possible to speak about power and power processes. This framework enabled reflections about how to integrate knowledge about societal injustices as well as values into psychological treatment, seeing neither her own nor the client's position in neutral terms. Furthermore, when this participant described boys' and girls' problems, she emphasized that a child is never just male or female, but that the therapist's understanding needs also to take account of many other categorizations and conditions such as ethnicity, socio-economic situation, etc. (cf. Wetherell, 2008).
Our analysis of the first interview points out how efforts to promote gender equality that are based in an ideal of neutral knowledge lead to a focus on “equal treatment” and seem to work to conceal the asymmetries in valuation and freedom of action of girls and boys. Our analysis of the second interview points out how efforts to promote gender equality that are based in an ideal of justice as the outcome opens possibilities to maintain attention on injustice and power issues related to gender. The latter is in line with what Bruns and Kaschak (2010), in their overview of contemporary feminist therapy, point to as one of its main tasks: “the reparative psychological redistribution of power inside and outside the therapy relation” (p. 189).
Overall, our analyses indicate how child psychotherapists' ideals regarding legitimate therapeutic knowledge impact their thinking about whether, and how, to counteract gender stereotypes through therapy. If therapists cordon off knowledge about societal inequalities from the practice of therapy, it seems unlikely to us that their clinical work can promote gender equality. Therapy that starts in an awareness of the existing inequalities in the lives of girls and women will inevitably be a better base than therapy that assumes what is still only a wished-for state: everybody's equal value.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the psychologists who participated in our research project for their courage and willingness to develop a deeper understanding with us in a difficult and dilemmatic terrain in psychological practice. We would also like to thank Katarina Blume, licensed psychologist and doctoral student, who conducted one of the interviews analyzed for this article. Finally, we would like to thank Jeanne Marecek and anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and helpful readings.