Experienced therapy for professionals in Jersey and further afield
Media and publications
Book
I am a contributing author alongside 18 other clinicians of 2023's Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice.
My chapter seeks to understand and critique the increasing politicisation of psychotherapy over the last decade. This politicisation results in the longstanding ethics of psychotherapy ceasing to exist in the frame of the work as a commitment to neutral exploration in the interests of the client. This vital ethical commitment is transformed into a morality located in the content of the work, as the therapist seeks to enforce socially dominant moral thinking on the client.
Ethical or unethical, this activity is simply not what the great therapists of the past would recognise as psychotherapy. Thus, therapists are turned into political activists promoting the will of dominant social actors rather than attempting to observe life existentially from outside the social orthodoxy (whilst noting that we are all products of our time and place to an extent).
A good therapist will never seek to enslave a client to his or her own political or moral perspective. Yet this appears to be an increasingly pressing problem from what I have seen coming out of training institutes and universities. You can find the book here:
amzn.eu/d/1czXG8r
criticaltherapyantidote.org/new-book-2/
Podcasts
If you want to get a bit more of a sense of me, how I think about psychotherapy and how I work, here are links to some podcasts I've had conversations with colleagues on:
Leslie Elliott's The Radical Center:
youtu.be/j37_SeaU_VM?feature=shared
The CTA podcast:
youtu.be/dT4qBk3_kEA?feature=shared
Michael Dewan-Herrick's Attention Bazaar:
youtu.be/RIe1zL5tgkE?feature=shared
I am a contributing author alongside 18 other clinicians of 2023's Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice.
My chapter seeks to understand and critique the increasing politicisation of psychotherapy over the last decade. This politicisation results in the longstanding ethics of psychotherapy ceasing to exist in the frame of the work as a commitment to neutral exploration in the interests of the client. This vital ethical commitment is transformed into a morality located in the content of the work, as the therapist seeks to enforce socially dominant moral thinking on the client.
Ethical or unethical, this activity is simply not what the great therapists of the past would recognise as psychotherapy. Thus, therapists are turned into political activists promoting the will of dominant social actors rather than attempting to observe life existentially from outside the social orthodoxy (whilst noting that we are all products of our time and place to an extent).
A good therapist will never seek to enslave a client to his or her own political or moral perspective. Yet this appears to be an increasingly pressing problem from what I have seen coming out of training institutes and universities. You can find the book here:
amzn.eu/d/1czXG8r
criticaltherapyantidote.org/new-book-2/
Podcasts
If you want to get a bit more of a sense of me, how I think about psychotherapy and how I work, here are links to some podcasts I've had conversations with colleagues on:
Leslie Elliott's The Radical Center:
youtu.be/j37_SeaU_VM?feature=shared
The CTA podcast:
youtu.be/dT4qBk3_kEA?feature=shared
Michael Dewan-Herrick's Attention Bazaar:
youtu.be/RIe1zL5tgkE?feature=shared
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
— Marcus Aurelius
— Marcus Aurelius