Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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Ngā Ao e Rua | The Two Worlds: Psychotherapy, Biculturalism, and Professional Development in Aotearoa New Zealand
Get PDFThis article describes the history, philosophy, and development of Ngā Ao e Rua, an organisation of indigenous and non-indigenous therapists, psychotherapists, counsellors, and health care providers working in Aotearoa New Zealand. The article, co-authored and edited by members of Ngā Ao e Rua, traces its beginnings and its development over the past ten years. The article discusses the development of a bicultural process reflected in an organisational structure whereby members meet separately as Māori and as Pākehā and Tau Iwi (non-Māori), and then together, and the personal and political learning that has derived from this. The article complements one published in this journal two years ago about Waka Oranga, the rōpu or organisation of Māori psychotherapists and psychotherapy practitioners (Hall, Morice, and Wilson, 2012)
Appealing to “The Better Angels of Our Nature” to Make Love, Not War!
Get PDFThis review article comprises some free associations and reflections on a conference held last year by the organisation of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility on the theme of “Occupying our Inner and Outer Worlds”
Psychotherapy under Capitalism: The Production, Circulation and Management of Value and Subjectivity
Get PDFThis article is concerned with the place of psychotherapy under capitalism. This is addressed using elements of the critique of political economy undertaken by Marx. I also argue that a Marxist critique of capitalist political economy is also necessarily feminist. I include analyses of the “feminisation” of work in order to grasp how value is produced, circulated and managed by psychotherapy, how subjectivity is targeted. Three aspects of psychotherapy are discussed to illustrate the value of a Marxist feminist approach to this particular practice of the self: the question of payment for the labour of a psychotherapist (and the labour of the client); the question of public health provision, focusing here on the UK's National Health Service; and the continuing debates about the role of the State and the regulation of public and private provision of psychotherapy
Practicing Method: Social Therapy as Practical–Critical Psychology
Get PDFWhat Marx referred to as “practical–critical, revolutionary practice” has been shaped into a human development practice of method, that is, social therapeutics, and its psychotherapy, social therapy. Both entail the communal and reconstructive activity of human beings exercising their power qualitatively to transform the current state of things, the transformation of the world and of ourselves being one and the same task. This practice is discussed as an ontological critique of mainstream psychology and psychotherapy, representing a move from critical (opposition, resistance, and destruction or deconstruction) to practical–critical (creating something new out of what exists, reconstruction/deconstruction)
Trauma under Fire: Treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Sderot
Get PDFThis article provides an insight into the work of a child clinical psychologist in Sderot, a small city in the south of Israel that suffered for several years from rocket attacks from the adjacent Gaza Strip. The article discusses the intersection between clinical work and politics as it manifests in the diagnosis and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder in the city. Using a clinical vignette, the article raises two questions regarding the responsibility of clinical psychologists. First, it invites them to consider political meanings during their clinical work, and second, to consider the role they play in creating a trauma-focused national narrative that preserves rather than tempers political conflicts
Sexual Dysfunction(s) in Iran: Imaginary Encounters with Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich
Get PDFThe article has two distinct but related aims. In the first part, I draw on previous research on Iranian sexual therapy, transgender studies, queer theory, psychoanalytic research and sexual economy to construct two clients. The first client is the subject of a Grossian, the second a Reichian, analysis. The symptoms were chosen to bring out the salient features of Gross and Reich's work, and to convey something of the complex psychological conflicts experienced by contemporary Iranians. In the second part of the article, I critique the limitations of Gross and Reich, while retaining those elements of their work still relevant to sexual emancipation
Schizoanalysis: Seizing Desire as the First Act of Revolutionary Psychotherapy
Get PDFThe question of psychotherapy and politics for scholars and activists (dare we say revolutionaries?) is set somewhere along its historical trajectory as bourgeois accommodation, reactionary social formation and its latent possibility as a social practice constitutive of revolutionary forms of subjectivity and consciousness. In this, the term “psychotherapy” has some of the same problematic historical 20th‐century resonance as words such as communism or democracy. However, it will be argued here that there may be some possibility to rethink psychotherapy as having new capacities within the shifting mode of production of global capitalism within what Marx termed the moment of “real subsumption”. To do so, a proposal for a radical political psychotherapy will be offered through a non‐dialectical immanentist reading of the psyche, drawing on Heraclitus and minor Marxism. This reading, it is suggested, opens the door to a re‐examination of Deleuze and Guattari's neglected proposals for schizoanalysis as revolutionary practice that may have much to offer as a response to the appropriations and brutality of global capitalism
Appraising the Role of the Individual in Political and Social Change Processes: Jung, Camus, and the Question of Personal Responsibility–Possibilities and Impossibilities of “Making a Difference”
Get PDFThe paper is an attempt to open discussion on the role of “the individual” in contemporary progressive and radical political discourse and criticism. Academic stress on the contexts in which individuals operate, while necessary and useful, cuts us off from sources for thinking about such a role. Jung's ideas about the relations of individual and social/collective are important and suggestive yet require extensive revision. Camus's book The Rebel is useful in making such revisions. Centrally, the paper proposes new thinking about “broken” and “fractured” individuals as it probes the limits of personal responsibility. Questions of individual political “type” or “style” are posed, intended to provide a novel account of how political attitudes, engagements and behaviours may be conceptualised. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd