In, Against and Beyond Therapy: Critical essays towards a post-professional era

In, Against and Beyond Therapy: Critical essays towards a post-professional era

by RichardHouse (Author)

Synopsis

In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" challenges the foundations of many of therapy's most take-for-granted and self-serving assumptions. Yet despite its title, it is very far from being yet another anti-therapy book. Rather, the book's central aim is to retrieve what is best in therapy work from what Richard House sees as the pernicious and ultimately deadening forces of institutional professionalisation; credentialism and careerism; 'audit-culture' obsessions with 'evidence-based practice'; and the 'apolitical' psychopathologising of clients - concerns well captured by the term 'the ideology of modernity'. In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" assembles some 15 years of updated critical writings within the broad therapy field, with incisively provocative commentaries on the professionalisation process, the client voice, therapeutic education and training, and research. For practitioners who are highly sceptical about the beneficence of the state regulation of the psychological therapies, this book promises to be a rallying-point for the development of a 'post-professional' therapy culture.It will be indispensable reading for critical psychologists, and for therapists of all persuasions and modalities who value critical thinking and challenge, and who welcome the opportunity to step outside of therapy's conventional, taken-for-granted 'regimes of truth'.

$30.05

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 372
Edition: 1st
Publisher: PCCS Books
Published: 05 Oct 2010

ISBN 10: 190625432X
ISBN 13: 9781906254322

Media Reviews
Counselling and psychotherapy certainly need prophetic voices at this critical time if they are to remain beacons of hope in a frenetic world. Richard House has been an indefatigable prophet for many years and here we have some of his bravest and most provocative contributions. Brian Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Counselling, University of East Anglia and Co-founder of the Norwich Centre No-one personally located within a mainstream professional organisation, whether an umbrella body like UKCP or a smaller training body, should ignore this book. Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex In this panoramic view of the state of therapy today that, unusually, has a view of the world outside therapy, Richard House writes with energy and purpose, providing us with arguments and reflections that are a delight to read.Professor Ian Parker, Discourse Unit, Manchester Metropolitan University. I recommend this book unreservedly to practitioners of every persuasion as an invigorating, transforming deconstruction of the prevailing assumptions of their role. John Heron, Co-initiator, South Pacific Centre for Human Inquiry
Author Bio
Richard House Ph.D. is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling, Department of Psychology and the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University. A trained counsellor and psychotherapist and a therapy practitioner since 1990, his books include In, Against and Beyond Therapy (PCCS, 2010), Therapy Beyond Modernity (Karnac, 2003), Against and For CBT (co-editor Del Loewenthal, PCCS, 2008) and Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos (co-editor Del Loewenthal, Karnac, 2009). Richard is a co-founder of the Independent Practitioners Network, in which he has participated since 1995, and of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy against State Regulation. Richard is also a trained Steiner Kindergarten and class teacher, co-founding the 'Open EYE' early childhood campaign in 2007, and, with author Sue Palmer, co-orchestrating the two press Open Letters on 'toxic childhood' and 'play' in 2006 and 2007, helping to precipitate a global media debate about the state of childhood in modern technological culture.