AHPb Magazine for Self & Society,
No. 5 – Spring 2020
Please note: as a special one-off contribution to the psy community during the coronavirus crisis, the AHPb has agreed to make the whole of this issue of our magazine free open access. In future issues, we will revert to our convention of less than half of the online magazine’s contents being open access – with the remainder being password-protected for subscribers/AHPb members only. For non-subscribers to gain full access in the future, and to receive our paper magazine twice yearly, you can join AHPb here. A PDF containing all the articles is available for subscribers to download. This requires the password sent as part of the email magazine on 21/5/2020.
Editorial – Richard House
Warm (very late) Spring greetings, dear members and readers. Editor’s confession time again: this issue is again unduly late – and for a cacophony of reasons. But as it happens, it’s perhaps not a bad thing that it is late – because if this issue had gone out in March, we’d have completely missed the cataclysmic impact ‘on both self and society’ of the coronavirus….
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Articles
‘A Glimpse of Love’: The Therapist’s Experience of Love in the Therapeutic Relationship… – Melita Rova, Del Loewenthal, Betty Bertrand and Catherine Altson
Melita Rova and colleagues offer a very substantial IPA research article on the place of love in the therapy experience from the therapist’s standpoint, giving empirical substance to a theme that is a perennial one for Humanistic Psychologists and therapists ….
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Politics, Psychology and Spirituality… – Jim Robinson
Jim Robinson, an old friend of S&S, shares his own struggles around questions of spirituality and political commitment that many of us will share, and how they can sit together – and floating in the process his exciting idea for the founding of a new ‘Institute for the Understanding of Human Nature’.…
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The Therapist as Gadfly… – Geoff Lamb
For Geoff Lamb, the gadfly ‘stirs us up and gets us moving’ – an apt metaphor for the peculiar work of therapy, perhaps! Should therapy be about symptom removal and helping people fit better into the status quo, or more about genuine transformation and human potential development? ….
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How Unexpressed Grief Affects our Politics and Our World – Gavin Robinson
Gavin Robinson explores the ambitious and enormously prescient theme of ‘how loss and grief and our ability to mourn can affect the power structures in society’ – taking us on a complex journey of how trauma impacts mind and body, and skilfully illuminated with a case-study ….
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Humanistic Dialogue between the US and the UK: Change the Rhetoric! – Elliot Benjamin
From the USA, Elliot Benjamin draws on his experience when leading last year’s AHPb Humanistic Psychology café in London to seek a shift from hate to love, when engaging with the fraught political conjuncture under Donald Trump’s presidency….
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The Human Crisis Created by the Politics of Greed – Mo Stewart
Mo Stewart offers us a succinct and outrage-generating summary of her tireless research work of the past decade exposing the British State’s systematic attacks on disabled people and the associated neoliberal drive to demolish Britain’s welfare state….
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Poetry – by Faysal Mikdadi and Susan Walpole
Interviews
Existentialism-humanism, US Style – Kirk Schneider and Richard House
In this wide-ranging interview, eminent leader of US Humanistic Psychology Kirk Schneider takes us on an enthralling journey into the existentialism-humanism that is at the core of his philosophy and praxis, and in so doing shines a welcome light for UK readers on humanistic-existential work in the USA ….
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Existentialism and Therapy, Bazzano Style – Manu Bazzano and Richard House
In this characteristically challenging interview, old friend of S&S Manu Bazzano takes on many sacred cows of the therapy world (not least those of the interviewer), and joyfully or uncomfortably (take your pick) leaves the reader with no choice but to think deeply about many of the taken-for-granted assumptions of therapy praxis and our human existence….
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Poetry – by Olivia Moune
Regular Columns
The Gillian Proctor Column
In the first of her new column, we’re delighted to welcome former S&S editor Gillian Proctor who takes us on a brilliantly illustrated journey into cultural and global existential crisis ….
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Stuart’s Political Column
In the welcome return of his iconic political column, Stuart Morgan-Ayrs is in characteristically robust form as he takes full on the UK Conservative government’s response to the coronavirus crisis ….
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Zohar’s Mystic Humanistic Agony Column
With her characteristic genius for putting her finger on the pulse of practitioner dilemmas, Dina (Zohar) Glouberman has wise words for holistic therapists struggling with the coronavirus’s impact on practice….
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Letter to the Editor
Martin Levy argues that our society’s obsession with metrics goes much further back than neoliberalism….
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Review Essays
REVIEW ESSAY: The Global Brain and its Hemispheric Separation (The Master and His Emissary) – Grethe Hooper Hansen
With her characteristic gusto and erudition, Grethe Hooper Hansen revisits a book of massive cultural and therapeutic prescience, and arguably one of the most important books to appear this past decade – the updated new edition of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World ….
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BOOK REVIEW ESSAY: Safeguarding Children and the Overreaching of the State into the Private Realm – Richard House
Richard House reviews an important new book on safeguarding, Lauren Devine’s The Limits of State Power and Private Rights, which refreshingly takes on, from a forensic legal perspective, the politically fashionable ‘industry’ of safeguarding and its relentless incursion into the private sphere ….
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RETRO REVIEW ARTICLE: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and the Horrific Face of a Pandemic – Daniel Tilsley
Daniel Tilsley looks searchingly at one of the most iconic films of cinematic history, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), and how it casts considerable illumination on the current coronavirus pandemic ….
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REVIEW ESSAY: Beneath the Sky (Pushing Back to Ofsted) – Faysal Mikdadi
Faysal Mikdadi finds much to be concerned about in this new book that subjects England’s schools inspectorate, OFSTED, to wide-ranging critical scrutiny ….
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Poetry – by Julian Nangle ….
Reviews
Krister Dylan Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity
Jay Beichman discovers much to enthral in this little-known book on William James’ (1842–1910) psychical research, and how central it was to his life and work….
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Barry Richards, The Politics of Psychology
Richard House uses Barry Richards’ latest book to argue that Richards’ important work at the self/society interface, spanning over three decades, has been unjustly neglected by Humanistic Psychology ….
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John Bunzl and Nick Duffell, The SIMPOL Solution
Geoff Lamb offers the journal’s second review of this thought-provoking response to, and proposals for a way out of, the current global crisis in the political-economic system ….
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Poetry – by Brian Thorne
The online ISSN of the AHPb Magazine for Self & Society is 2374-5355.