Profile
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Ana Maria Garza-Freudenthaler
Birth:
1960
Training Location(s):
Diploma, Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) (1984)
Primary Affiliation(s):
LEFÖ - Counseling, Education and Support for Migrant Women
Other Media:
Career Focus:
Psychological counseling, migration, sex work, violence against women
Biography
Ana Maria Garza-Freudenthaler is a Psychologist and worked for 30 years at the Vienna counseling center LEFÖ - Counseling, Education and Support for Migrant Women. Born Garza Saldivar, she was born on March 27 1960 in Torreón, Mexico. In her childhood, both her mother and aunt, who was a psychoanalyst and "a great role model", as well as later her grandmother, were important female figures who supported her on her path of studying Psychology – which her father did support at least financially. After attending high school in Torreón and beginning a professional career in dance, Ana Maria Garza left her hometown at the age of 19 to realize her dream of studying Psychology in Guadalajara, Mexico at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO). During her studies, which she financed as an assistant and group leader in a kindergarten, she lived with her grandmother, whom she describes as a "modern woman" and feminist. From 1983-84 she completed an internship in the university outpatient clinic of ITESO that offered psychological counseling to people who could not afford psychotherapy.
Ana Maria Garza was very interested in music therapy and went to Vienna for a year from 1984-85 to be trained in music therapy. She had previously met an Austrian in Mexico with whom she was in a relationship and who would later become her husband. From 1986 to 1988 she returned to Mexico and worked as a Psychologist in a school for psychotic, autistic and developmentally disabled children in Mexico City. The following year, she and her partner decided to live in Austria and moved permanently to Vienna. She describes her first time in Vienna as "really difficult". For fundamental reasons, she did not apply for nostrification of her Psychology studies in Mexico.
In 1990, through a radio call, she heard of the LEFÖ counseling center, which was founded by exiled women from Latin America and was looking for a psychologist at that time. In her first years as a volunteer and later as an employee of the counseling center, she worked from then on as a psychological counselor at LEFÖ. She describes her work in the counseling center as her "life project" and describes the organizational culture as very conducive to development, which she attributes, among other things, to the collective meetings and supervision sessions of the counseling center with a psychoanalyst. In addition to her work, she completed a three-year course in crisis intervention in Vienna, which had a strong influence on her, and equipped her with important techniques for her work. She also attended the university course in Person-Centred Conversation Therapy (Rogers) and various further training courses in women's counseling, e.g. at Frauen beraten Frauen and further training courses organized by LEFÖ. However, she emphasized in the interview that her specific knowledge of women's problems has mainly come from clients from whom she has learned a lot. Some of these women were also involved in setting up and organizing the counseling center, both as victims and clients. At the beginning, she describes the clients' great reservations about psychological and feminist counseling, which she was able to overcome over time:
I think this feminist attitude, through being in the collective, was reinforced for me, yes, with the work. It was always with effort and joy because it was important, and also when I listened to what the women wanted, what the women needed, or that they hear that there is also an unconscious part, and to process that and to admit that and to reflect with the women, that was very, very important. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021).
In her counseling work, a holistic and client-centered approach was very important to her. In the interview she argued against any form of paternalism in counseling and therapy: "For me, the most important thing in this work is to listen, to be attentive and respectful of all the individual processes that are eventually transformed into collective processes, so, and that it is important to accompany these processes with great patience". (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021) She worked with clear agreements on goals exclusively according to the mandate of her clients, integrating different approaches in her work. Ana Maria Garza characterizes her partiality for the clients as feminist:
I could not remain neutral, I had to stand by the women, how do you say, so, really side with the women. That is a very important approach in feminism, as much as I understood. Where do all these insecurities, all these fears come from? They have to do with this male-dominated, structural violence in society. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021)
She sees the problems of Latin American women in Austria at the interface of migration experience, racism and violence– problems that she herself was also affected by and which she reflected frequently in order to be able to support her clients in the best possible way:
And these supervisions were very important, because they were never case supervisions, but rather: What is happening in the work with the women? What is happening with me, with the confrontations and with the problems? And what am I missing? And that was always a topic for me, something was always missing. (...) For example: What happened to me in this overall situation, when we absolutely couldn't do anything, yes? What happened to me when I was at a court hearing and a judge was a sexist and a really discriminating person, this powerlessness, you know? What do I do in that situation? I can't scream. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021)
In this context, Ana Maria Garza also mentions her clients' knowledge about problems as a starting point for change. Furthermore, she sees the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work as central problems of LEFÖ's target group. Within the framework of the project TAMPEP - Information, Counselling and Health Prevention for Migrants in Sex Work, which emerged in 1998 from an EU project she was involved in, the concept of "Cultural Mediation" was developed to explain the idea that "mediators who worked in street work or in the sex work field, should come from the same culture (...), they were (...) sex workers themselves (...), they were experts in their work" (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021).
She is particularly proud not only of her own work, which she misses after retirement, but also that both her children are feminist and that her daughter has now also become a psychoanalyst.
By Barbara Rothmüller (2021)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Selected Works
By and about Ana Maria Garza
Garza, A.M. (07, July 2021). Interview by Barbara Rothmüller [Audio recording].
Ana Maria Garza-Freudenthaler
Birth:
1960
Training Location(s):
Diploma, Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) (1984)
Primary Affiliation(s):
LEFÖ - Counseling, Education and Support for Migrant Women
Other Media:
Career Focus:
Psychological counseling, migration, sex work, violence against women
Biography
Ana Maria Garza-Freudenthaler is a Psychologist and worked for 30 years at the Vienna counseling center LEFÖ - Counseling, Education and Support for Migrant Women. Born Garza Saldivar, she was born on March 27 1960 in Torreón, Mexico. In her childhood, both her mother and aunt, who was a psychoanalyst and "a great role model", as well as later her grandmother, were important female figures who supported her on her path of studying Psychology – which her father did support at least financially. After attending high school in Torreón and beginning a professional career in dance, Ana Maria Garza left her hometown at the age of 19 to realize her dream of studying Psychology in Guadalajara, Mexico at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO). During her studies, which she financed as an assistant and group leader in a kindergarten, she lived with her grandmother, whom she describes as a "modern woman" and feminist. From 1983-84 she completed an internship in the university outpatient clinic of ITESO that offered psychological counseling to people who could not afford psychotherapy.
Ana Maria Garza was very interested in music therapy and went to Vienna for a year from 1984-85 to be trained in music therapy. She had previously met an Austrian in Mexico with whom she was in a relationship and who would later become her husband. From 1986 to 1988 she returned to Mexico and worked as a Psychologist in a school for psychotic, autistic and developmentally disabled children in Mexico City. The following year, she and her partner decided to live in Austria and moved permanently to Vienna. She describes her first time in Vienna as "really difficult". For fundamental reasons, she did not apply for nostrification of her Psychology studies in Mexico.
In 1990, through a radio call, she heard of the LEFÖ counseling center, which was founded by exiled women from Latin America and was looking for a psychologist at that time. In her first years as a volunteer and later as an employee of the counseling center, she worked from then on as a psychological counselor at LEFÖ. She describes her work in the counseling center as her "life project" and describes the organizational culture as very conducive to development, which she attributes, among other things, to the collective meetings and supervision sessions of the counseling center with a psychoanalyst. In addition to her work, she completed a three-year course in crisis intervention in Vienna, which had a strong influence on her, and equipped her with important techniques for her work. She also attended the university course in Person-Centred Conversation Therapy (Rogers) and various further training courses in women's counseling, e.g. at Frauen beraten Frauen and further training courses organized by LEFÖ. However, she emphasized in the interview that her specific knowledge of women's problems has mainly come from clients from whom she has learned a lot. Some of these women were also involved in setting up and organizing the counseling center, both as victims and clients. At the beginning, she describes the clients' great reservations about psychological and feminist counseling, which she was able to overcome over time:
I think this feminist attitude, through being in the collective, was reinforced for me, yes, with the work. It was always with effort and joy because it was important, and also when I listened to what the women wanted, what the women needed, or that they hear that there is also an unconscious part, and to process that and to admit that and to reflect with the women, that was very, very important. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021).
In her counseling work, a holistic and client-centered approach was very important to her. In the interview she argued against any form of paternalism in counseling and therapy: "For me, the most important thing in this work is to listen, to be attentive and respectful of all the individual processes that are eventually transformed into collective processes, so, and that it is important to accompany these processes with great patience". (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021) She worked with clear agreements on goals exclusively according to the mandate of her clients, integrating different approaches in her work. Ana Maria Garza characterizes her partiality for the clients as feminist:
I could not remain neutral, I had to stand by the women, how do you say, so, really side with the women. That is a very important approach in feminism, as much as I understood. Where do all these insecurities, all these fears come from? They have to do with this male-dominated, structural violence in society. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021)
She sees the problems of Latin American women in Austria at the interface of migration experience, racism and violence– problems that she herself was also affected by and which she reflected frequently in order to be able to support her clients in the best possible way:
And these supervisions were very important, because they were never case supervisions, but rather: What is happening in the work with the women? What is happening with me, with the confrontations and with the problems? And what am I missing? And that was always a topic for me, something was always missing. (...) For example: What happened to me in this overall situation, when we absolutely couldn't do anything, yes? What happened to me when I was at a court hearing and a judge was a sexist and a really discriminating person, this powerlessness, you know? What do I do in that situation? I can't scream. (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021)
In this context, Ana Maria Garza also mentions her clients' knowledge about problems as a starting point for change. Furthermore, she sees the criminalization and stigmatization of sex work as central problems of LEFÖ's target group. Within the framework of the project TAMPEP - Information, Counselling and Health Prevention for Migrants in Sex Work, which emerged in 1998 from an EU project she was involved in, the concept of "Cultural Mediation" was developed to explain the idea that "mediators who worked in street work or in the sex work field, should come from the same culture (...), they were (...) sex workers themselves (...), they were experts in their work" (Garza, interview with B. Rothmüller, 2021).
She is particularly proud not only of her own work, which she misses after retirement, but also that both her children are feminist and that her daughter has now also become a psychoanalyst.
By Barbara Rothmüller (2021)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Selected Works
By and about Ana Maria Garza
Garza, A.M. (07, July 2021). Interview by Barbara Rothmüller [Audio recording].