AHPB Magazine for Self & Society, No. 2 – Winter 2018/19

AHPB Magazine for Self & Society,
No. 2 – Winter 2018/19


Please note: around a third of this magazine is free open access, and the remainder is password protected for subscribers only. AHP subscribers were sent the password with the email magazine on 29/1/2019. For non-subscribers, to gain full access, you can join AHPb here.

The magazine is available as a single PDF for download (subscribers only).


Editorial

Welcome, one and all, to the second issue of the AHP online ‘magazine’ (as we’re now calling it) for Self & Society. We think we have another bumper issue for readers.
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Digital Technology and the Health and Wellbeing of Children and Young People

Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield is that rare phenomenon amongst research scientists – a neuroscientist who has the courage to speak out publicly against technological change where she sees it having possibly problematic consequences for our humanity. In this article, we are delighted to publish exclusively an extended version of her recent speech in the UK House of Lords on digital technology and children.
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The Merging of Humanistic Psychology and Progressive Politics

In this, the first part of a two-part article, Elliot Benjamin poses a question that all humanistic psychologists and therapists must have surely grappled with – viz. what is the place of politics and political allegiance in the work we do and in our engagements with the world? ‘Is it appropriate to include progressive politics in Humanistic Psychology?’, Elliot presciently asks. This article cannot but help to deepen our thinking about whether, and if so, how, we ‘do’ politics.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Happiness, Austerity and Malignant Individualism

With the reform of state benefits continually in the UK news these days, this article by Philip Thomas and Tamasin Knight is particularly timely, subjecting to searching critical scrutiny the ways in which the psychological therapies are being recruited in what are ethically highly dubious ways to support a government back-to-work agenda. This article complements the one by Mo Stewart elsewhere in this issue of the magazine.
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21st-Century Welfare: Understanding the Present

Following our interview in the previous online issue, Mo Stewart takes us on an uncompromising, meticulously documented whistle-stop tour of the modern democratic and moral outrage that is the UK Conservative government’s benefits policy towards the country’s disabled citizens. Those with blood-pressure issues are recommended to keep their medication close to hand before reading this scarcely believable story that could easily be titled ‘Death by the Hand of the British State’.
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The Heart’s Journey

The late, recently deceased poet and psychotherapist, Jay Ramsay, has written a proundly evocative poetic essay on the place of the heart alongside his reflections on an Interfaith Pilgrimage to Iona in 1990. Jay sees the heart as ‘the place of unification in which we are One World People’. For Jay, ‘our own chosen spiritual practice and path is also a pilgrim path’.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Three Kinds of Madness

Serge Beddington-Behrens chaired the plenary session beautifully at last year’s June AHPb conference on ‘Love, Madness and Transformation’. Here, Serge has written a reflective piece inspired by his experience of what was, by common consent, a deeply moving event, in which he describes three kinds of ‘madness’ – ‘cuckoo’, ‘divine’ and ‘normal’.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Interview with Ernesto Spinelli

Existential therapist and leading authority in his field, Professor Ernesto Spinelli, gives an extended enlightening interview on how well existential and humanistic therapies sit together, describing what is distinctive about the existential-phenomenological approach, and with fascinating arguments on how critically minded therapy should remain a countercultural, ‘fringe’ activity – or in the paradoxical ‘peripheral centre’, as he calls it.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Interview with Sami Timimi

Professor Sami Timimi is a psychiatrist whose humanity shines through in everything he writes and says, and who maintains a consistently critical perspective on mainstream psychiatric theory and practice. In this interview-dialogue, Sami shares his many insights on a wide range of psy-related themes that will chime strongly with humanistic practitioners, showing what a truly humane and non-medicalized psychiatry could look like in a world that foregrounds critical-humanistic principles.
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‘How Humanistic Psychology Has Changed My Life’ – I

In a new contribution to this regular series, psycho-historian and long-time Self & Society contributor Nick Duffell shares his personal and professional journey through the HP world and its many vicissitudes and creative challenges. Nick concludes that HP has helped spawn a legacy for recognizing that ‘the inner life of humans is inseparable from the outer, and that self and society are eternal twins that need our attention’.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


‘How Humanistic Psychology Has Changed My Life’ – II

In another contribution to this regular series, former Self & Society co-editor Jennifer Maidman shares a moving, painful and ultimately triumphant childhood story that illustrates how she was ‘discovering that most humanistic of processes, self-actualization, though I’d yet to come across the term’….
(Subscribers only) Read more …


A Mini-Symposium on Climate Emergency and Extinction Rebellion

A bottom-up, grass-roots uprising of concerned citizens is sweeping the globe – with people no longer putting up with humankind’s complacent ecological destructiveness. Extinction Rebellion (XR) is making headlines with fearless direct action and civil disobedience. Here, one of XR’s prime movers, Skeena Rathor, offers her personal perspective on this new global social movement, and with invited commentaries by Denis Postle and Nicola Saunders.
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Letters Supporting Extinction Rebellion

Guardian Press letters supporting Extinction Rebellion
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A new regular! – Zohar’s Mystic Humanistic Agony Column

In a new regular ‘agony aunt’ magazine column, psychotherapist and long-time supporter of the AHP and Self & Society, Dr Dina Zohar Glouberman, offers her response to a reader’s question about the so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’ and what women want in relationship. If you have a question you’d like to ask of Zohar, please email it to the editor at richardahouse@hotmail.com.
(Subscribers only) Read more …

 

 

 


A tribute to the legendary jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth

Self & Society readers will know of the interview we did with the legendary jazz guitarist John McLaughlin in 2016. Soon after our interview, the brilliant virtuoso jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth died at the tragically young age of 70. We asked John to send us some words about Allan’s extraordinary musicianship, and he generously sent us this tribute.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Letter to the Editor – on S&S and the late John Rowan

Gaie Houston briefly reminisces about the early days of Self & Society, and John Rowan’s deep involvement in it.
(Subscribers only) Read more …

 

 

 

 


Poetry review: The Testimony of the Trees, by Lynne Wycherley

Poetry editor Julian Nangle is wowed by a new and highly unusual poetry anthology that brilliantly foregrounds mounting concerns about the harm being done by electro-magnetic pollution in our increasingly technology-saturated world.
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Book review – Creative Place-based Environmental Education: Children and Schools as Ecopreneurs for Change

With mainstream schooling in unprecedented crisis, and ecological and earth-care issues igniting globally, there is currently a yawning space for new pedagogies that advocate care for the earth and a sense of place and culture as core values for a post-growth world. Roger Duncan reviews an exciting new book that beautifully answers this call.
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Retro review – Nietzsche on learning and education

Onel Brooks reviews a classic text by philosopher David Cooper on why ‘father’ of postmodernism, Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy is so important for understanding learning and education. In considering the implications of ‘postmodernism’, and more generally continental philosophy, for psychotherapy, for Onel Nietzsche’s writings are crucial.
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Book review – Love, Madness and Transformation

Graham Mummery is very impressed by Dina Zohar Glouberman’s personal and professional memoir of a therapist’s life-journey through love, madness and transformation, and all the many vicissitudes that make up a creative and courageous human life.
(Subscribers only) Read more …

 

 

 

 


Short book reviews – The Snake in the Clinic and Immoral Education

Magazine editor Richard House reviews two recent and impressive books which will be essential reading for therapists and educators, respectively.
(Subscribers only) Read more …

 

 

 

 

 


Poetry by Graham Mummery

Graham Mummery offers a poem inspired by Jean Gebser (1905–1973), who was a philosopher, a linguist and a poet who described the structures of human consciousness.
(Subscribers only) Read more …


Poetry from the late Jay Ramsay

Jay died peacefully just after Christmas last year (2018), and before he passed, this great modern poet and friend of Self & Society offered the magazine these poems, which he wrote in 2010 and 2016.
(Subscribers only) Read more …

 


 

The online ISSN of the AHPb Magazine for Self & Society is 2374-5355.