Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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Bereavement: Personal experiences and clinical reflections. Edited by Salman Akhtar and Gurmeet S. Kanwal. London, UK: Karnac, 2017. 240 pp.
Get PDFBereavement: Personal experiences and clinical reflections. Edited by Salman Akhtar and Gurmeet S. Kanwal. London, UK: Karnac, 2017. 240 pp
My retreats at Auschwitz 2014 and 2015: Towards becoming free of the past
Get PDFThis “note” describes two retreats that the author undertook at Auschwitz, in Poland, and a process whereby he was able to move towards being free of the past
Face and facial disfigurations: Self and alterations of self
Get PDFThis article explores facial disfigurations and the alterations they trigger in the shared social space. It places an emphasis on the trauma associated with acquiring severe facial wounds, as well as with coming into visual contact with disfigured faces. These themes are explored through three layers of analysis. The first is the author's personal account of an encounter with a severely wounded face, which she experienced as profoundly altering her identity and social space. The second stresses the structural underlay of one's experience of an embodied face. The article engages with a Lacanian framework that posits that a person's face is formed in three ontological registers: the symbolical, the imaginary, and the real. When the face is disfigured and the eyes do not look back but an abyss returns the look instead, one's own subjectivity is threatened as one is disquietingly made aware of what Jean-Paul Sartre (1943/1992) and Jacques Lacan (1988) each called “the gaze”. The third layer of analysis includes various accounts of mediating the trauma of disfigurement, such as disfigured soldiers' experiences, as well as additional examples borrowed from films, novels, and art shows. Together they aim to show different trauma closure techniques used at the personal and social levels
A person-centred political critique of current discourses in post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic growth
Get PDFThis article seeks to contribute to current person-centred research exploring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and post-traumatic growth (PTG), by offering a person-centred political critique of some individualizing/pathologizing ways in which these two discourses seem to be developing. Notions of lower resilience (Regel and Joseph, 2010), faulty brains (Bell, 2007), lower intelligence (Bomyea, Risbrough, and Lang, 2012), faulty femininity (Lilly, Pole, Best, Metzler, and Marmar, 2009) and personal deficits (Joseph, Murphy, and Regel, 2012) are identified. Some troubling parallels with the borderline personality disorder (BPD) discourse are drawn. Yet, while the meanings/implications of a BPD diagnosis increasingly attract stringent criticism, current PTSD and PTG research is not being sufficiently challenged from a political perspective. The article argues that person-centred approaches (PCAs) need to be more recognized as treatments for PTSD – this work is already underway (see Murphy, Archard, Regel, and Joseph, 2013, for instance) – and that, concurrently and then increasingly, practitioners of PCAs must intervene in the PTSD discourse, also challenging themselves to conceptualize what is now termed PTSD as actually just one incongruence amongst many, rather than a psychopathology encountered by some (deficient) people
Politics of psychoanalysis in liberal and neoliberal capitalism
Get PDFThis article offers a discussion on the politics of psychoanalysis in liberal and neoliberal capitalism. After jointly reflecting on the persistence of neoliberalism in these times of Trump, the two authors separate and exchange various arguments, some more closely related to Marxism and others closer to Freudianism, in discussing the positions of psychoanalysis in regard to various aspects related to capitalism: its liberal modality and its patriarchal foundation, its scientific and university guises, money and the market, the socialist alternative and the revolutionary horizon
The trouble with numbers: Some fundamental flaws with using standardised outcome measures
Get PDFThe modern paradigm of evidence-based practice dominates the therapeutic world and influences all aspects of the profession. Yet this pervasive concept is based on surprisingly shaky ground. When looked at in detail, the source of the raw data used as the basis of much of this evidence, standardised outcome measures, can be seen to be fundamentally flawed. This article sets out the many methodological, sociopolitical, and technical flaws in standardised outcome measures, and asks what this means for the field of psychotherapy
Constructing research from an indigenous Kaupapa Māori perspective: An example of decolonising research
Get PDFThis paper articulates an example of a piece of research undertaken on the basis of a Kaupapa Māori and non-Western epistemology. The research acts both as a personal endeavour, and as a political stand against the dominant Western paradigm of mainstream research. The intent of this paper is to reveal a different form of “knowing,” and invite the reader to reflect on their own “position” in relation to this stance. Consequently, findings from the research have not been discussed. The use of Māori and non-English terms is intentional, and presents the reader with an opportunity to experience what it is like to be excluded through the process of languaging. In the spirit of generosity though, as practiced and perhaps required by many indigenous cultures, translations have been provided within the main text or within the glossary
Stone-Balance and photograph: Gottfried M. Heuer, Iona, Scotland, 2016
No full textI have a dream of migrants carried safely 'cross the sea to Europe, as mythical Europa was, erstwhile by the sacred bull
Therapy and the counter-tradition: The edge of philosophy. Edited by Manu Bazzano and Julie Webb. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016. 199 pp.
Get PDFTherapy and the counter-tradition: The edge of philosophy. Edited by Manu Bazzano and Julie Webb. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016. 199 pp