AHPb Magazine Self & Society, No. 4 – Winter 2019-2020

Logo for the AHPb Winter 2019-2020 Magazine

AHPb Magazine for Self & Society, No. 4 – Winter 2019–20

 



Please note:
less than a half of this magazine is free open access, and the remainder is password-protected for subscribers only. AHPb subscribers were sent the password with the email magazine on 18/2/2020. For non-subscribers, to gain full access, you can join AHPb here. A PDF containing all the articles is available for subscribers to download.


Editorial – Richard House

Welcome to the 4th issue of our online AHPb Magazine for Self & Society. I want to start with a confession and an apology. This issue is labelled ‘Winter 2019–20’, and I had intended to have it completed and sent out to subscribers by the end of 2019. However, the small matter of a British general election intruded on to the scene…. Read more …


Special theme issue on Supervision

Guest Editorial – Robin Shohet

Robin Shohet introduces eight original articles on supervision in the psy and helping professions, written by diploma students as part-fulfilment of their diploma training qualification on their Centre for Supervision and Team Development training course. These high-quality papers make a significant contribution to the existing literature on supervision in the helping professions…. Read more …


Love and Loss in Supervision – Anon

Anon’ offers a very personal account which explores the presence of love in supervision, and the importance of being able to be vulnerable to enable the love to emerge and flourish. Love, vulnerability and loss feature centrally in this searingly honest and moving article, which explores the ending of a lengthy supervisory relationship, and the deep feelings of loss that ensued.… Read more (subscribers only) …


Sick of Safeguarding – Steve Burchell

In what is one of the best papers I have ever read in my time as editor of Self & Society, Steve Burchell looks at the shadow side of the safeguarding phenomenon, and how it can fail to achieve its stated aims by actively disempowering both those doing the protecting, and those who are seen as needing protection…. Read more …


Equality and Power in the Supervisory Relationship: Delicate Symmetry – Ana Cox

Ana Cox explores the themes of power imbalance and inequality – relational phenomena which are ingrained in society more generally, and so will likely appear in professional relationships like supervision. Ana advocates a frank conversation with supervisees on these themes, maintaining that notwithstanding a built-in imbalance because of supervisors’ greater experience, an equality on another level is possible…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Supervision: An Opportunity to Recover from Toxic Shame – Michael Eustace

For Michael Eustace, toxic shame constitutes a common theme in the kinds of crises that bring people into therapy, with society having an investment in promoting such shame as one means of control. Michael shares how Eugene Gendlin’s focusing technique has enabled him to separate from his own toxic shame, and how, through this separation, he has found a creative space beyond shame that he can offer to his supervisees…. Read more  …


Supervising the Therapist who Works with Adolescent Clients – Jennifer Foran

Jennifer Foran offers a rich and enlightening personal account of the particular needs of supervising those working with adolescents, focusing in particular on the need to avoid defending against the strong countertransference feelings that can be evoked in both therapist and supervisor. At best, the supervisor can ‘provide a container and fertile ground for adolescents to gain the courage to grow up and become the person who they are’…. Read more …


Manager and Supervisor: Being an Adult within an Organisation – Sarah Fraser

Sarah Fraser describes her vocational journey as a supervisor in organisational settings, which she formulates as an aspect of growing up, and how she fell in love with supervision. In her managerial role, Sarah finds the seven-eyed model of supervision and the Karpman drama triangle especially helpful in elucidating these processes, and she particularly valued a systemic perspective, enabling her to find her place within the system with greater authority and presence….  Read more (subscribers only) …


Courage in Supervision – Elizabeth Kovacs

Elizabeth Kovacs describes the conditions which create ‘fertile ground’ for growth, development and the courage to be truly ourselves – such a vital prerequisite for effective supervision; and some of that courage is deployed in this very article, as the author shares her challenging journey in writing the paper. Elizabeth draws on Carl Rogers ‘Core Conditions’ for therapeutic growth to help explicate her personal journey around courage in this challenging work…. Read more …


The Unique Aspects of Supervising Trainee Counsellors – Sarah Worley-James

Sarah Worley-James explores the dynamics of supervising trainee counsellors where, at least potentially, the power imbalance between supervisor and trainee/supervisee might be at its greatest. Drawing on her less-than-positive first experience of supervision as a trainee, in her work in a university counselling service she places great emphasis on the importance of providing a good first experience for her trainees, and describes in detail her core conditions for enabling this to occur…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Other Articles


Learning and Education as if Our Humanity Mattered: Some Personal Reflections – Faysal Mikdadi

Faysal Mikdadi draws on a long career in teaching and education to outline what is wrong with current mainstream educational practices, and what needs to happen for us to retrieve and re-found the true he/art of learning. Faysal’s burning wish is to urge all young persons to ‘Let your imagination run wild so that you can see beyond the self-evident, so that you can learn to deal with life’s tortuous entanglements and uncertainties and so that you can live beyond the accepted three dimensions of space-time and reach that fourth dimension emanating from your “inner spark of divine fire” that no one can take away from you.’…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Ofsted Seeks Judgement-free Approach to ‘Stuck schools’ – but What about Its Own ‘Stuck’ Methods of Accountability? – Richard Brinton

Richard Brinton is sceptical about the extent to which recent progressive-sounding noises emanating from England’s schools inspectorate, Ofsted, really represent a significant change in an institution which, he argues, has for nearly three decades controlled the nation’s schools via a regime that has fear and compliance as its core ideology. For Richard, ‘The logical conclusion is to reform the whole inspection system with a generous infusion of humanistic educational values and practices, including the removal of the high-stakes accountability system’…. Read more …


A Love Letter from the Future – Skeena Finebaum-Rathor

Skeena Finebaum-Rathor, with some poetic and evocative assistance from Rumi, imagines herself into a future where it is possible to look back and contextualise the human-evolutionary importance of the Extinction Rebellion movement of which she is a key and founding part, and in which love and the human heart play a central role in humankind’s unfolding journey towards finding a way to live in harmony with the earth and with all of creation. For Skeena, ‘We are living testaments to the miracle of life. Imagine and dream the impossible, and share these dreams – they are prayers and prophecies in the making. Dream big and wild, dream passionately and gracefully, dream with gratitude and dream relentlessly.’…. Read more …


Interviews


5G Technology Demands a Precautionary Approach: An Interview with Michael Bevington – Michael Bevington and Richard House

In this strongly argued interview, authority on 5G technology Michael Bevington maintains that if the already-substantial health issues around electro-sensitivity are not to be made far worse by the ubiquitous roll-out of 5G technology (with an estimated 435,000 UK citizens already unable to work due to symptoms and illnesses caused by radiation susceptibility), a precautionary approach must be adopted until there is clear evidence that this technology is not going to exacerbate the harm that is already being done to humans and ecosystem by non-ionising radiofrequency radiation. The piece is also noteworthy for providing a detailed up-to-date bibliography of relevant literature…. Read more …


Interview: Trauma and Its Impact on Politics: Finding a Way to Dialogue on Anti-Semitism – Gavin Robinson and Richard House

In this challenging interview on a deeply contentious subject, therapist Gavin Robinson draws upon trauma theory to argue that if we are to understand the deeply troubling phenomenon of anti-Semitism and the difficulties it has caused in Britain’s Labour Party, we need to understand as fully and compassionately as possible its deep traumatic roots, in a way that can offer both psychodynamic understanding and an empathic humanistic engagement. For Gavin, ‘we live in a traumatised world, where our “threat” system is affecting the way we behave and live as individuals and as a whole…. [W]ordlessness needs to be filled with words of comfort, not words of hate, and we can be proactive in that. The unconscious needs to become more conscious.’…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Review Essays


Retro-review Essay: We Do Not Control the Narrative: A Retro-Review of John Carpenter’s film In the Mouth of Madness (1994) – Daniel Tilsley

Daniel Tilsley draws on a film by iconic horror director John Carpenter to present a detailed analysis of the plot of In the Mouth of Madness, illustrating how film narratives can offer profound insight into our human condition and its ever-present dystopian possibilities. As Daniel writes, ‘horror texts can be subversive and oppositional. They can help induce new ways of seeing – in a sense, functioning as a form of therapy, in that they can awaken us from entrenched perspectives and interpretations of reality’; and ‘the therapeutic power of horror fiction… reveals to us the absurdity of our lives, awakening us to the fact that we are not in control of the narratives of reality’…. Read more …


Review Essay: On the Quantification of the Social, and Its Vicissitudes – Richard House

Richard House reviews an important new book by German sociology professor Steffen Mau, in which Mau brilliantly investigates what he calls ‘the metric society’, and its increasingly pervasive impact in terms of the breakneck quantification of everyday life that modern technology is affording, and with especial attention given to these technologies’ collateral and unintended negative impacts – sometimes also termed the ‘Audit Society’ (Michael Power). As Richard concludes, ‘anyone who is concerned about the future trajectory of the human species will want to figure out whether the multiple costs and mal-effects of the quantification of the social are worth any benefits that these technologies confer. …Humanistic practitioners of all hues ignore this momentous trend in hyper-modern society at our great peril.’…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Reviews


Manu Bazzano, Nietzsche and Psychotherapy

Hugh Knopf finds the richest of stimulation in this vital new book by former Self & Society Book Reviews Editor, Manu Bazzano, which brings therapy into fruitful engagement with one of the West’s greatest philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche…. Read more …

 

 

 

 


Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

Evelyn Wasdell shares some forthright views on what is missing in Naomi Klein’s influential book, informed by her path-breaking work with David Wasdell on the collectively unconscious pre- and peri-natal roots of humankind’s environmental crisis…. Read more (subscribers only) …

 

 

 

 


Rupert Read, A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment

Daniel Tilsley finds much that is conducive in Rupert Read’s articulation of how a philosophical perspective on film can have relevance to our most pressing ecological concerns…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Marianne Williamson, A Politics of Love

Jim Robinson welcomes us into his inner struggle to make sense of Marianne Williamson’s bringing together of politics and love, and the sense he’s making of his own current stance on the tension between ‘inner’ spiritual development and ‘outer’ political engagement…. Read more (subscribers only) …

 

 

 


Jose Luis Vivero-Pol & others (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons

Annie Levy finds much to stimulate and challenge in this formidable new collection that brings a welcome commons perspective to the issue of food – as she writes, ‘as a paradigm to think with, and also as practices that need to be recognised as such’ – ‘reclaiming thinking about food (and its inputs) in terms beyond commodity value, and towards the many other meanings that underlie its essential roles’…. Read more …

 

 


Poetry


Poetry Review: Poppy and Other Poems of Grief and Celebration by Julian Nangle – Adam Horovitz

Gloucestershire poet Adam Horovitz finds much to admire and be touched by in Julian Nangle’s deeply moving poetic striving to understand, and find meaning in, one of the most painful of journeys of any human life – the loss of one’s own child.… Read more …

 

 

 


Poems

31st January 2020 by Brian Thorne…. Read more …

Fear by Julian Nangle…. Read more (subscribers only) …

Love by Julian Nangle…. Read more …

Fight the Good Fight by Brian Thorne…. Read more (subscribers only) …

No Shameful Silence by Brian Thorne…. Read more (subscribers only) …


Conference Notice


Conference Alert! – ‘People Not Pathology…’, Birmingham, 2–3 May 2020

Read more …


 

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