Something about the new editors
David Kalisch writes: I’ve been involved with Humanistic Psychology, in one way or another, since 1973, when I started my first therapy with a Canadian Gestaltist at Community Growth Centre, in those distant days when Humanistic Psychology was to be experienced, breathed, felt and expressed rather than a course of study leading to a Diploma, with an experiential component attached. I underwent my first experiential trainings in Humanistic groups in the 1970s in North Devon, where there was no set reading, no written assignments and no Diplomas as such. What a different world!
More recently, I’ve been on the Editorial Board of Self and Society since David Jones took over the editorship, and I felt honoured, daunted and challenged when Richard invited me to join him and Jennifer in a new Editorial collective. This is a new venture for me and I look forward to the journey ahead with a mixture of trepidation and excitement.
I’ve been in private practice in the South West of England for nearly 25 years, having informally trained in Neo-Reichian Gestalt in the late 1970s and subsequently, more formally, in Core Process Psychotherapy in the late 1980s. I work with individuals and couples and have been a Supervisor for nearly 20 years. I started my therapeutic practice essentially as a Group Therapist running groups at a Mental Health Centre in Exeter, and my own Gestalt Groups in various venues in the South West.
From 1990 as Director of The Centre for Humanistic Psychology and Counselling, I developed and ran courses for Exeter College in Gestalt Therapy, Counselling Skills, a one year Introduction to Humanistic Psychology and then a two year Diploma in Humanistic Counselling which ran successfully for many years, under different tutors. With colleagues Andrew Forrester and latterly Jenny Dawson, we then concentrated on developing and running Professional Trainings in Gestalt Therapy and, more recently, Gestalt Groupwork, and have also run, in the past, introductions to Gestalt and other shorter personal growth courses.
The main influences on my therapeutic approach are Gestalt Therapy, bodywork approaches, modern trauma approaches, transpersonal work and psychoanalytic and existential thinking.
My intellectual interests encompass – at varying degrees of depth – literature, politics, economics, sociology, philosophy and neuroscience. Sattipattana and Zen Buddhism provide a spiritual practice and perspective and are a profound influence on me personally and on my practice.
On the political level, I have contributed, particularly in the early days, to the movement against the statutory regulation of Counselling and Psychotherapy and was naturally pleased to see the current Government give up its plans to regulate a profession that in many respects is doing quite a good job of regulating itself.
I am an Affiliate member of UKAHPP, have served, briefly, on the board as Southwest representative, and am an ordinary member of BACP. I am a qualified and accredited EFT practitioner.
Outside of these sphere, my interests are: my increasingly large family, football (watching, alas no longer playing), music (playing and listening), golf, gardening and travel.
Richard House writes: In the academic world, I’ve been a Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology at the University of Roehampton since November 2005, and have worked as a ‘counsellor’ (my preferred term) in NHS, voluntary and private practice, and as a supervisor, for around 20 years. I teach modules on Person-centred Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Post-modernism, Counselling In Education and Critical Psychology, and I have a wide range of research interests, including the professionalisation of psychotherapy and counselling, critical/post- psychiatry, the politics of ‘evidence’, early-years learning and policy-making, the psychodynamics of learning and teaching, research and the ‘audit culture’, and holistic/transformative and post-structural/postmodern approaches to learning, education and research.
My therapeutic orientation is broadly integrative, but my practice is deeply rooted in humanistic thinking, with other strong influences coming from post-modernism and phenomenology, Winnicottian psychoanalysis, and the transpersonal (especially Jung’s and Rudolf Steiner’s cosmologies). My accreditation and accountability is through the Independent Practitioners Network (IPN – the Leonard Piper Group), of which I was a co-founder in 1994, and which was set up to create a non-didactic, non-institutional accountability framework which is consistent with the core values of therapy work.
I’m also a founder-member of, and an active participant in, the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, an independent, cross-modality organisation of therapy practitioners committed to helping protect the diversity and independence of psychotherapy and counselling. As many readers will know, the Alliance campaigned strongly for several years against the Health Professions Council’s (HPC) proposed statutory regulation of the psychological therapies, and we had what was, for us, a major victory when the coalition government decided to drop the HPC regulation proposals. The Alliance has recently launched a new campaign, challenging the unscientific bias towards CBT shown by the Department of Health’s NICE clinical guidelines for psychotherapy and counselling through its IAPT programme.
I am also a committed campaigner on psychosocial issues in and around childhood, being a founder-member and active participant in Open EYE, a campaign with a high media profile formed in late 2007 to challenge certain aspects of the government’s compulsory pre-school curriculum, the Early Years Foundation Stage. I’ve also worked in publishing as an editor for some 30 years, and my published books include Implausible Professions (co-editor, Nick Totton; PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 1997/2011); Therapy Beyond Modernity (Karnac Books, London, 2003); Against and For CBT (co-editor, Del Loewenthal; PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 2008); Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos (co-editor, Del Loewenthal; Karnac Books, London, 2009); and In, Against and Beyond Therapy (PCCS Books, 2010).
I am passionate about a lot of things; but my greatest passion of all is to create a space in which all voices can be heard – even if at least some of those voices are saying things that I don’t personally like. This is a core principle that I wish to bring to my editorship of this journal and its wonderful history – for as one of my greatest heroes, William Blake, so poignantly wrote, ‘Without contraries is no progression’.
So – Please get involved in the development of your new journal!
As already mentioned, we would like to invite your participation in the journal’s development on two levels:
- if you think you could offer editorial abilities to the journal and would therefore like to propose yourself as a member of the new editorial board, do contact us; and
- if you should have any ideas for the content, style or design of the new journal, do please send them to us. They can either be endorsements of, challenges to or developments of, the tentative ideas we’ve listed above. Or they might be genuinely new ideas and innovations that we’ve not even thought of. All suggestions are warmly welcomed!
Contact the editors using the contact form on this website.
To discuss reviews, contact our reviews editor, Neill Thew.
To submit poems, contact our poetry editor, Julian Nangle.
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