Psychotherapy and Politics International (E-Journal)
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Towards a Rainbow‐Coloured Therapeutic Community
Get PDFA rainbow‐coloured therapeutic community is a term inspired from South Africa's Rainbow Nation after its 46‐year period of apartheid. This term does not just represent the fact that South Africa is diverse but that skin colour was not going to be the defining factor in valuing the needs and wishes of its citizens. In the UK acute mental health services are overrepresented by people of colour. Most would agree that the caring profession should reflect the community that it serves, but will this be enough to reduce the overrepresentation of people of colour in acute services and inspire them to seek a service at an earlier stage? In this article I will look at the current state of play and then look at the efforts people have made to change the situation
Voices from the Void: A Depth Psychological Reconceptualization of Sex Trafficking in Modern‐Day India
Get PDFHuman trafficking is practiced in many countries throughout the world, and every year millions of women and children are bought, sold, and traded into commercial sexual and labor‐based slavery. Of these countries, India is one of the largest portals and destination grounds for the trafficking and sexual enslavement of women and children. Victims of trafficking live under the daily threat of their own torture, abuse, and death, and in most cases even the torture and murder of their families, should they try to escape their captors. It is the immeasurable fear used to manipulate these women and children that eclipses the abject poverty impelling their exile into the darkest shadows of human existence. Within this context, it becomes important to consider how healing which moves towards restoring humanity, authentic voice, and soul to those who have been stripped and silenced in this regard can begin. In my opinion, the realm of depth psychology is unique in its ability to hold the tension between substance and shadow as it impacts oppressed populations and the socio‐cultural philosophies that have perpetuated silence and margin
The Umwelt and Networks of Archetypal Images: A Jungian Approach to Therapeutic Encounters in Humanitarian Contexts
Get PDFThis paper attempts to develop a new framework within which to comprehend the interrelationship between the ‘inner’ and ‘external’ worlds, between the personal and social, and among the intra‐/inter‐/trans‐psychic realms. It proposes the Umwelt as a heuristic concept to grasp and formulate these interconnections. Then, it argues that if we expand the Jungian theory of archetypes by introducing the concepts of ‘network of archetypal images’ and ‘collective structures of meaning’, it is possible to develop a more coherent framework to address ‘therapeutic encounters’ in the context of humanitarian work. The process of ‘therapeutic encounter’ is distinguished from ‘doing therapy’. An example of such an encounter is offered and a new reading is suggested of processes and phenomena that are often examined through existing approaches
Ontological Structure and Complexity of Therapeutic Hope: A Multidimensional Perspective
Get PDFDespite the daunting challenge to hope and hoping currently confronting millions of traumatized populations throughout the world, the psychology literature has largely been silent on the proper meaning of therapeutic hope, and how hope can be resuscitated in people demoralized by extreme hardships or unpredictable life events. This anomaly perhaps arises from the fact that in spite of several and honest acknowledgements found in Western scholarship, about the relevance of hope‐healing in the human conditions of captivity or tragedy, a gap still exists as regards the multidimensional conceptualization of the ontology and epistemology of hope that should enable psychologists to have a firm grip not only on the multidimensional constituents of hope and hoping but also on how it lives and dies, how it heals and how we can enhance its positive component in people (individuals or groups) beleaguered by its over‐determination by the negative component of hopelessness and other devastating conditions of existence. Through a selective review of the scattered literature on hope and hoping, some of them drawn from outside of the mainline psychology field, this paper draws attention to the ontological complexity of the hope construct and to the factors and forces that combine to promote its activation, healing value and endurance. The overall aim is to move towards a more informed multidimensional re‐visioning of the construct
Reviews
Get PDFI am delighted to introduce a renewed section of Reviews in PPI. I want to thank Nick Totton for inviting me to undertake this role, and James Taylor for fulfilling this role since the launch of PPI in 2003 to 2008. I hope to expand this section in a number of ways. Firstly, I would like to extend the medium of books to include different media such as DVDs, and CD-ROMs; websites; film and theatre; and events such as exhibitions. We live in an era of multi- and expanding media and my hope and ambition are that these pages reflect this as much as possible. To this end I welcome contributions in the form of reviews of such media as well suggestions for reviews, including links to media or events. Secondly, I would like to develop more of a dialectic between and development of the elements of the subject of the journal, that is: psychotherapy and politics. As Nick outlined it in his book Psychotherapy and Politics (Totton, 2000) there is: psychotherapy in politics; a psychotherapy – or, more accurately, plural psychotherapies and analyses – of politics; and there are politics of psychotherapy; and, of course, politics in psychotherapy. To this end I welcome reviews of books and other media concerned with psychotherapy (and, by this, I include the fields of counselling and counselling psychology) from a political perspective, and those concerned with the political or social world from a therapeutic perspective. Thirdly, I would like to welcome new reviewers. I have inherited a list of reviewers and would very much like to expand this to include those from countries other than the UK and the USA so as to expand the ‘international’ in and the internationalism of PPI. To this end I welcome people contacting me about their interest in becoming reviewers for PPI and in reviewing specific books (see list below).Finally, I would like to encourage different forms of review. To this end, in addition to the traditional book or media review (of between 750 and 1000 words), I want to encourage people to submit review articles where they might develop the themes of a particular book or media; contributions which review more than one book (as in my review below), as well as shorter pieces; and reviews of articles of relevance and interest published in other journals. It is often said that we live in interesting times and it is certainly true that we live in turbulent times in a changing world and a shifting planet. I hope that this section of PPI can reflect such turbulence, disturbance and changes – for worse or better
The Gentle Violence of Therapists: Misrecognition and Dis‐location of the Other
Get PDFUsing Pierre Bourdieu's ‘theory of symbolic violence’ and ‘misrecognition’ this paper focuses specifically on the way sexuality and gender are negotiated in therapeutic training. Drawing from UK‐based research over the past decade with 70 qualified and registered, predominantly cis‐gendered, heterosexual and non‐heterosexual therapists, I reflect upon, and offer reasons for, the way therapeutic studies continually struggle to offer legitimacy and recognition to mainstreaming anything other than heteronormative versions of social, sexual and emotional life and how an alternative reading using queer theory, can complicate the terrain of sex, sexualities and genders and offer a way out of the present impasse. My own interest in ‘misrecognition’ focuses on the epistemic violence perpetrated when there exists a complicit subordination to the dominant group, and how this is a far more violent practice towards those who are already marginalized, disempowered and socially excluded in relation to sexed, sexualized and gendered bodies because it legitimates oppression, resists radical shifts in power and has wider implications for citizenship (particularly emotional) and sociality. I focus on the strategies employed by therapists to perpetuate this type of ‘gentle violence’ and how it impacts on the construction of the social and emotional self. Although sex, sexuality and gender form the basis of this research, I am only too aware of how these may be used to provide discrete categories within ‘interlocking systems of oppression’ that also include race, ethnicity, class and ableism. For the sake of this article, intersectionality is considered a useful tool, from which to re‐negotiate and re‐cognize the violent context of therapy and its underlying practices
Before and Beyond Auschwitz: Ethics, Memory, Citizenship and Belongings
Get PDFThis paper explores how Western culture has struggled to include Auschwitz (as a symbolic location) within its view of humanity and culture, both theoretically, politically and emotionally. The principal points of reference are Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman. The paper argues that pre‐Auschwitz concepts and experiences of ‘normality’ can no longer be applied in the post‐Auschwitz world. It ends by tracing the relationship between the European treatment of the Jews in the 20th century and the current European treatment of asylum seekers and refugees
‘The sacredness of love’ or ‘relationship as third’: otto gross' concepts of relationship today
Get PDFThe paper focuses on three different themes to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the early psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (1877–1920), which reverberates through a number of disciplines. With some of his ideas, Gross goes way beyond modernity and post‐modernity towards a post‐postmodern revolutionizing of both individual as well as collective – political – ways of understanding relating. These are being linked to cutting‐edge discoveries in three realms: firstly, neurobiology and research into human behavioural as well as maturational processes; secondly an unusual understanding – albeit not entirely new – of political justice and, thirdly, philosophical‐analytical theories of relating. Around the time of the recent millennium, completely new concepts and ideas were formulated which both fundamentally verify some of Gross' concepts and, of course, take them further. These current ideas are also linked with regard to a possible aim: in each instance, they focus on what Otto Gross some one hundred years ago first described as the transformation of the will to power between self and other – with the aim of freeing a capacity to love, a capacity to relate that Gross always understood simultaneously as interpersonal as well as intrapersonal and intrapsychic
Cultural memory and psychosocial narratives: Remembering 1968
Get PDFThrough reflecting back on the political imaginations and urgencies that informed an engagement with 1968 I share some of the promise and the difficulties in relating the personal to the political. I show the appeal of a certain kind of class politics but also the silences and suppressions that it can create through its tacit universalism, which involves, with Marx, a transcendence of differences. Through exploring the cultural memories of a political moment I argue for the importance of learning from these social inventions and experiments for ways of living differently in the present and for revisioning a notion of democratic politics. Learning to listen to ourselves in our differences, but also to others in what we share, I argue for shaping different kinds of psychosocial narratives that can bring thinking across the boundaries of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I argue for embodying identities in ways that do not fix people into pre‐given categories but allow for a fluidity that grants a sense of equal respect and equal voice as we shape multicultural psychotherapies that can learn from the cultural memories of the past as we learn to engage with different layers of experience