Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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Somebody? Anybody? Nobody? Moments of Meeting with the Wounded Body in the Therapeutic Encounter: Intricate Challenges and their Healing Potential
Get PDFMeeting with the wounded body in the therapeutic encounter introduces us to intricate challenges. Physical injury or serious illness may be visible at times and invisible at others. In a society which prioritizes beauty, perfection, and health we find it difficult to be fully present and compassionate for the disabled, diseased or otherwise unusual body. We are caught with unconscious fears, deepening the split within us and leading us to denial and objectification of the wounded body. People coping with serious illness and disability are confronted with physical pain, fear, shame, humiliation, frustration, and social alienation. They crave an accepting attendance and recognition for their wounded body as a whole. As psychotherapists, our presence has a decisive impact on the therapeutic process. Moments of genuine meeting, in which we allow ourselves to surrender to the pain and suffering, and let them move through us, touching and affecting us, when we carry those unbearable feelings with our patients, those precious moments potentiate healing. In this paper, I describe and examine the obstacles preventing us from fully attending the wounded body, and the ways in which we can overcome those challenges and create moments of human interconnectedness leading to mutual growth. I will interweave those issues with sharing my experience with two clients, each coping with a significant physical damage, and my own personal perspectives and experience around illness and disability
Alternatives to Adversarial Processes in the Regulation of Professional Ethics
Get PDFProfessional regulatory bodies, including ethics committees, association boards, and government licensing authorities, oversee the ethical behaviour of professionals, specifically monitoring their use of power. A key element of such regulation is the hearing of ethics complaints against practitioners. This generally involves adversarial type processes which attempt to echo the legal system. The use of these adversarial models of investigation and discipline is called into question here and other possibilities are outlined
Power, Self, and Psychosis: Examining Political Subjectivity Through Schizophrenia
Get PDFA meaning‐oriented approach is employed to analyse recurring themes in the psychotic speech of a young woman inpatient diagnosed with schizophrenia in Istanbul, Turkey. The analyses aim to investigate the form and nature of the relationship between the subjective content of psychosis and the local sociocultural context. This article illustrates the significant role played by semiotic processes in embedding the individual sense of self and identity within collective systems of meaning. More specifically, this article highlights the ways in which local structures of power and meaning become intertwined with the sense of self at the deepest levels of the organisation of subjective experience. The notion of political subjectivity is proposed as a descriptive term for that process
Retrieving the Past for a Usable Present: Anarchism, Psychoanalysis and Revolutionary Transformation in the Early 20th Century
Get PDFThis article examines the relationship between different expressions of psychological therapy, alternative movements such as anarchism, and the potential for revolutionary social and personal transformation. By drawing on the history of socio‐political movements in different European countries in the early 20th century, we suggest that approaches to healthcare and to social and individual transformation have much to learn from what is generally a forgotten or underestimated past. While the circumstances that engendered radical movements dedicated to psychoanalysis, therapy, and social change were the product of specific contexts, the current precariousness of European health systems and the increasing incidence of psychological damage invite a critical look to the past for inspiration for our embattled present. Germany in the 1890s and Spain in the 1930s are focused upon in particular with these aims in mind. All translations from the original Spanish in this article are our own unless otherwise stated
“The Blood‐Dimmed Tide”: Witnessing War and Working with the Collective Body in Authentic Movement
Get PDFThis article considers how the impact of witnessing war, violence, and news of sexual abuse, as well as processing these themes in clinical work, can be mediated through the practice of Authentic Movement in a group setting. Dramatic movement stories narrate the author's journey into the underworld, and the processing of the visceral impact of violence in the embodiment of the self‐states of victim, bystander, rescuer and perpetrator. Set in a reflexive discussion of the collective body, politics, trauma theory, Aristotle's concepts of catharsis and pity, this article concludes with the acknowledgement that the role of a witnessing community is vital
Dwelling in Relationship: Nurturing the Needed Capabilities for Setting up Humane Governance
Get PDFInterpersonal neurobiology indicates that reasoning and identity grow from the social self schema, itself internalised in the infant in response to the first social field. One could say the social field gives rise to the mind using the intermediary of the brain. The individual and the group are in a tight reciprocal relationship. Psychotherapy works at this interface, where the inner world interacts with the outer world, where power and choice are known personally, in direct relationships. This paper takes a wide‐ranging journey through core concepts of self, imagination, power, and choice, identifying the areas of work where psychotherapy can deeply impact on our institutional formulations and functioning. Companioning clients in the psychotherapeutic relationship builds resilience and resources in the face of difficulties and the unknown, develops fluidity, and encourages intimacy and the building of cooperative working relationships, thereby setting up the necessary conditions for a liberation of the politics of governance from dependency, passivity, and bureaucratic fixations into more humane‐based communities of being and action
Prejudice as Ideology: The Creation of “Us” and “Them” Groups in Society (and Psychoanalysis)
Get PDFPrejudices are never experienced as prejudice: they always seem reasonable. Forms of multiculturalism presume that we are prone to prejudice when we are faced with strangers whose ways and looks we are unfamiliar with. They think that one can be taught to think and experience differently though a process of familiarization and education. This work takes place in the conscious realm. Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, provides a range of explanations that have their sources in the workings of the internal worlds of individuals. The main culprit here is the mechanism of projection. To this way of thinking, the antidote to prejudice is greater self‐knowledge and a better understanding of one's internal world. This work is grounded in the unconscious realm. While each of these discourses has its merits, neither explanation is sufficient in itself. I think that this is because neither gives sufficient weight to the way power relations structure psyche as well as social context. I will argue that an understanding of the human condition grounded in the works of S. H. Foulkes, Norbert Elias and Donald Winnicott provides us with a deeper way of grasping the workings of prejudice. Finally, I will use these ways of thinking to draw attention to, and think about, the forms of prejudice (and the rationales that bolster them) to which the world of psychoanalysis is prone
Therapy as Unconditional Hospitality
Get PDFThe paper examines ideas of morality and ethics and their implications for contemporary psychotherapy. Drawing on Arendt's definition of the citizen, as well as on post‐structuralism and Zen, it promotes a theory and practice of therapy inspired by radical ethics and the notions of unconditional hospitality and not‐knowing
Rehabilitating Psychology in Australia: The Journey from Colonising Agent to Cultural Broker
Get PDFHistorically, research, theory and practice have focused on promoting and maintaining Western privilege through Western knowledge and Western ways of knowing that deny the validity of Indigenous knowledge and culture. In Australia, psychology, in particular, has been complicit in the colonising process and, as a dominant discourse, has a documented past that has been ethnocentric and has objectified, dehumanised, and devalued those from culturally different groups. It has acted as an agent for assimilation and oppression. As psychotherapists who may be invited into the lives of Indigenous clients, we need to develop reflective competency in, and respect for, the distinct and diverse nature of Indigenous cultural identity and experience if we are to successfully forge meaningful therapeutic alliances. We need to engage in a journey of decolonisation. Such a journey will take many of us through two mindscapes, two worlds. Decolonisation is not a simple process. Managing its complexity requires personal, professional, and social introspection, and commitment to change. This paper offers a model for decolonisation which can support this process. Central to the success of this model will be the role psychotherapists can play as change agents and cultural brokers in developing approaches which are fully committed to genuine reconciliation