A bright future is being planned for the journal we all love, say newly appointed editors Richard House, David Kalisch and Jennifer Maidman
The following article by the new editors appears in the next issue of S&S. You can read it here now, and it will be of interest especially if you would like to contribute to the development of our journal.
We are delighted to announce that as from next Summer 2012, Self and Society will be taken into the next phase of its existence by a newly appointed editorial collective – namely, ourselves. We see this as an exciting opportunity to develop this much-loved journal in a number of innovative and stimulating ways, and in this brief article we wish to introduce ourselves briefly, and perhaps more importantly, to ask you, the readers and subscribers, to tell us how you would like to see the journal develop. More on this later.
We’ll begin by setting out some provisional ideas that we’ve already developed. Please note that none of these are by any means set in stone, and are open to development and organic emergence. As the new editorial collective, we are as open as we can be to considering any suggestions for productive ways in which Self and Society can develop. Notice, first, that we are already calling Self and Society a ‘journal’, and not a magazine. We’d like to adopt a new sub-title for the journal – viz. ‘International Journal for Humanistic Psychology’. This is by no means a grandiose delusion: our vision, along with the AHPB board, is that Self and Society become a prominent international forum for humanistic psychology and associated practices, covering developments right across the globe. We agree with one of the AHPB board, who recently wrote that ‘we all have to work towards managing the tension between remaining humanistic and modernising, and that is not easy!… We could be in danger of getting too caught up in the business end of things and I think we need to be very mindful that whatever actions we take, we must act in accordance with our humanistic principles.’
This seems to us to be crucial. As the new editors, we are the very last people to be mechanistic ‘professionalisers’ – for over the years, we have each, in our different ways, been very critical of over-professionalisation that sacrifices the ‘soul’ and core values of humanistic work on the altar of respectability, fashion, one-sided academicism, political correctness or professionalised self-interest. In terms of the future of Self and Society, our overriding aim is to make absolutely sure that we stay true to core humanistic values – yet within that, to present humanistic practice and theory to the world in such a way that conveys our gravity and central (‘third-force’) importance to the therapy and wider community. After all, humanism was founded back in the 1950s, at least in part, to reign in the excesses and imbalances of both psychoanalysis and behaviourism, and to reclaim the human values that both first and second ‘force’ were in danger of forgetting or jettisoning – and the new editors share the view that this is still an historic task of humanistic psychology, that’s just as relevant today as it ever was.
So if we can find a way that fully honours both Heart and Head in the new Self and Society (if that’s not too Cartesian a metaphor), we can – and are determined to – end up with the best of all worlds, and show the wider ‘psy’ world just why there is such a need to continue the perennial ‘post-professional’ attitude and sensibilities that Carl Rogers, Ivan Illich and others so brilliantly proclaimed back in the 1970s. We are currently working on a detailed proposal for the form that a renewed Self and Society could take, and we wish to invite your contributions to this emerging process, because only by initiating such a listening process will we have at least a sporting chance of creating a journal which responds to the wishes of the readers, as well as satisfying our own editorial vision.
Now to list briefly some of the ideas for new sections that we’ve had in our discussions to date. First, we envisage an extended editorial structure to the journal which will include
Associate Editors, Special Honorary Editors, a new Editorial Board, a Book Reviews Editor, and an Ethical Dilemmas Editor.
Next, we envisage a journal with perhaps 3–4 more ‘popular’ articles per issue, and a similar number of substantial peer-reviewed (academic) papers per issue. In this way, our aim will be to preserve the alive, engaging aspect of the current Self and Society that we all love, and also introduce a more formal academic section in the journal, which will enhance the status and gravity of humanistic psychology and the humanistic therapies in wider professional world. Far from seeing this as selling out to professionalisation, we see this as an acknowledgement of the realities of many humanistic practitioners, especially those working in the NHS who would benefit from their orientation having a far more prominent status and legitimacy in the professional and academic literature and community. We cannot emphasise sufficiently strongly that this new departure will be one that complements the existing journal, and will not in any way replace, side-line or extinguish the ethos of the Self and Society that has existed successfully over a number of decades.
We will also be looking closely at the journal’s design – we think it needs to be bigger in size, more like a ‘normal’ academic journal size, but perhaps being slightly smaller than this norm. A good analogy might be the Guardian newspaper’s current size in relation to its broadsheet competitors.
It seems very likely that subscription rates will need to be overhauled; but we trust that an expanded circulation will in time finance at least some of the expansion of the journal, meaning that the subscription rates hopefully won’t require a substantial hike – and we’ll certainly do all we can, along with the AHPB board, to avoid this.
Finally, we’ve also had a number of ideas for new regular sections in the new Self and Society – namely:
- A ‘Topical Debate’ section
- An ‘Opinion’ section
- Special Guest Interviews
- Ethical Dilemmas section
- A ‘Client Voice’ section
- A Psy-Society section: politics, society, culture and humanistic psychology
- Conference/Workshops reports
- The Humorously Humanistic Corner
- Trainer’s page
- AHPP news section
- Notice Board and Classifieds
- Humanistic Retro Classics – book review essay
- A Regular Cartoon
- ‘Humanistic TV’ – links to an online presence, e.g. the letters page could continue online in a readers’ forum, links to blogs, downloadable talks, Youtube etc.
- New literature listing: listing of latest books relevant to humanistic psychology
Read more about the editors in S&S, or on the S&S page soon.
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