Her published work is significant in its sustained challenge to the use of reductive psychology and for bringing anthropological and sociological ideas to bear on the subject of art therapy.
Dominant conceptual frameworks tended to see the locus of illness as situated firmly within the psychopathology of the individual, though the way that this is understood is different in psychoanalytic and analytic (Jungian) theories.
The essay 'Problems of Identity' allowed a paradigm shift to take place by offering cultural, rather than purely psychological explanations for states of being, with respect to women’s experience of mental illness in particular.
The way that motherhood is contested and conceptualised is complex and potentially destabilising for women’s mental health, so it is a subject that has continued to preoccupy Hogan in a series of essays and book chapters as well edited volumes.
Hogan has argued for over twenty years that it is essential not to view women with mental distress in reductive ways that further compound our suffering and which help to consolidate social processes that are fundamentally toxic and illness inducing.