AHPb Magazine for Self & Society, No. 6 – Winter 2021

Banner for the Winter 2021 NewsletterAHPb Magazine for Self & Society,
No. 6 – Winter 2021


Please note:
as a special contribution to the psy community during the coronavirus-related ‘lockdown’, the AHPb has agreed to make a substantial proportion of this issue of our magazine free open access. In future issues, we intend to revert to our convention of less than half of the online magazine’s content being open access – with the remainder being password-protected for subscribers/AHPb members only. AHPb subscribers were sent the password with the email magazine on 31/1/2021. A PDF containing all the articles is available for subscribers to download. For non-subscribers to gain full access in the future, and to receive our paper magazine twice yearly, you can join AHPb here.


Editorial – Richard House

Richard writes: Welcome to the sixth online magazine for Self & Society – a bit later than I’d hoped; but as you’ll soon see, we have the richest of cornucopias in this issue – in my view one of the very best issues of this journal we’ve ever produced.
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  Articles and Interviews


How Integrative Psychotherapy Can Address the Anthropocene Crisis – Brigitta Mowat

Brigitta Mowat urges us to engage with environmental concerns and ‘the Anthropocene Crisis’ in our client work, using four clinical vignettes exploring how and why the human species considers itself separate from ecosystems, and what needs to shift such that we can be part of, rather than split off from, the more-than-human world.
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LONG INTERVIEW: …Where Science and Society Meet – the Contemporary Relevance of Paul K. Feyerabend, 1924–94 – Ian James Kidd with Richard House

Ian James Kidd tells Richard House about Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science, and the profound contemporary relevance of his critical perspectives on science and technology – with a penetrating commentary by Roehampton University’s Onel Brooks.
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A Person-Centered Critique of CETA and Other Research- / Evidence-based Psychotherapies – Blake Griffin Edwards

Blake Griffin Edwards critiques research- and evidence-based psychotherapies from a person-centred perspective, arguing that the person-centred process, not a series of manualised techniques, constitutes the soul of psychotherapeutic change.
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Making Love to Your Data: On Post-qualitative Research and Therapy – Manu Bazzano

Manu Bazzano maintains that both quantitative and qualitative research now operate within the positivist paradigm governing therapy and counselling, offering us post-qualitative research as a means for ‘embodying the intricacies, complexities and multiplicities of human experience’ – a mode of inquiry that draws upon post-structuralism and Critical Theory.
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Steiner and Intersubjective Psychology: The Healing Power of the Betweenness Experience – Simon Kuttner

Simon Kuttner brings together the insights of intersubjective psychology and psychoanalysis with Rudolf Steiner’s cosmology, exploring the consequences of denying this relationality experience in early life, with an analysis of how therapists can help clients rediscover and re-create this relational sphere where healing can begin.
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On Uncertainty – David Lambert

David Lambert invokes John Keats’ notion of ‘negative capability’ to show how the need for certainty is possibly fuelling both sides of the divide that has arisen around the current coronavirus pandemic, pointing out that people on both sides at least stand on the common ground of desperately trying to cling to, or manufacture, certainty for themselves.
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Poetry by Brian Thorne

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INTERVIEW-DIALOGUE: Why Black Lives Matter: Power, Privilege and Patriarchy? – Todd DuBose and Michael R. Montgomery

Todd Dubose and Michael R. Montgomery offer us a wide-ranging interview-dialogue encompassing racism, Black Lives Matter and issues around power and gender, and with Todd and Michael both concluding that their ‘souls have been enriched’ through this deeply moving heart-to-heart engagement.
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LONG INTERVIEW: A Journey through the World of (Humanistic) Education – Saville Kushner with Richard House

Saville Kushner draws on his highly successful academic career as a professor of education to deep-dive into his long-standing interest in, and engagement with, humanism in education – showing how ‘humanistic education’ is urgently needed in a schooling system erstwhile dominated by audit culture and right-wing political agendas.
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LONG INTERVIEW: Erich Fromm in Humanistic Perspective – Daniel F. Davis with Richard House

Daniel Davis focuses on prolific writer and cultural critic Erich Fromm’s theory of Social Character (SC) and its urgent contemporary relevance, providing as it does the missing link between Marx and Freud, and showing how Fromm’s theory of the ‘marketised’ SC mirrors Daniel’s own experiences of growing up in a hyper-consumerist world.
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Commentaries


A Commentary on Sally Goddard Blythe’s article ‘The body learns too’ – Colwyn Trevarthen

Colwyn Trevarthen writes: In her recent article ‘The body learns too’, Sally Goddard Blythe (2020), a psychologist and Director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology (INPP) – created in 1975 by Peter Blythe, a psychologist who had worked in psychotherapy and taught applied psychology and education – has given us an optimistic and vital account of how a partially formed ‘immature’ brain of a healthy young child learns to ‘grow up’ to maturity in engagements of the body with the world.
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Seeing Patriarchy from the Inside: A Commentary on Miki Kashtan (2020) – Senan Clifford

This is a response to Miki Kashtan’s recent writings on overcoming patriarchy, notably in this publication (Self & Society) – ‘The power of soft qualities to transform patriarchy’ (Kashtan, 2020), as well as her earlier blog ‘Why patriarchy is not about men’ (Kashtan, 2017).
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Remembering Peter Schmid – with Brian Thorne and Gillian Proctor

Brian Thorne writes: Peter Schmid died on 15 September 2020, and I still cannot quite believe or fully accept that he is no longer with us. I am only gradually coming to terms with the enormous gap he has left in my life and in the lives of his countless friends and colleagues throughout the world.
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Regular Columns


The Gillian Proctor Column

Gillian Proctor writes: I have always been suspicious of those in power, struggling to believe in good intentions or care rather than a wish for power-over. At times, this has felt to be only a small step away from a belief in conspiracy hypotheses, and I want to explore my understanding of the dividing-line.
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The Miki Kashtan Column

In ‘Sharing Impacts for Increasing Intimacy’, Miki Kashtan writes: ‘Humans are embedded in relationship to such a degree that everything within us is in the process of ongoing, incessant mutual influencing. Even when alone, we each operate within a larger “we” we are always part of.
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Erin’s Political Column – with Erin Stevens

Erin Stevens writes: I write this article in December 2020, as a member of the European Union. When you read this, I, and millions of others, will have been stripped of our European citizenship: no longer will we be able to travel freely through Europe.
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Zohar’s Mystic Humanistic Agony Column – with Dina (Zohar) Glouberman

Zohar writes: This is a period which is so unprecedented in so many ways, one where so many lives and livelihoods are at risk, and on top of everything else, which presents constant changes in information and in regulations. No wonder so many people are feeling very anxious indeed.
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Letter to the Editor

Paul & Sinzi Barber write: We wish to acknowledge and support all those readers who are actively questioning and championing civil liberty and individual freedom in these morally impoverished times…
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Poetry – by Brian Thorne

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Review Essays and Reviews


REVIEW ESSAY: The New Frontier of Power: Human or Machine?

Image of the cover of the book 'Surveillance Capitalism'Sofia JoHannson reviews The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

Sofia JoHannson writes: …In any event, what Zuboff’s book reveals is that while the majority of people have been using the rapidly changing new technologies for ‘connection’ and entertainment, a minority of well-funded, powerful initiatives have been hard at work mastering not just how to predict people’s behaviour, but to ‘tune’, ‘herd’, ‘replicate’ and – most uncomfortable of all – to go beyond controlling it, but actually produce it – our behaviour, that is!
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REVIEW ESSAY: Reason Undone by Passion

Image of the cover of the book 'Technosystem'Faysal Mikdadi reviews Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason by Andrew Feenberg

Faysal Mikdadi  writes: This is a complex and intricately argued work. Nonetheless, it is not a difficult book to read. This is because Feenberg has done a brilliant job of writing it. Whatever arguments he presents, no matter how complex, he starts from the very basics and builds incrementally on them in order to reach the inevitable, eloquently stated conclusion.

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REVIEW ARTICLE: The Methods of Qualitative Phenomenological Research

Image of the cover of the bookImage of the cover of the bookShanice Thomas reviews How to Write a Phenomenological Dissertation by Katarzyna Peoples, and Introduction to Phenomenology: Focus on Methodology by Cheryl Tatano Beck

The recent monographs by Katarzyna Peoples (How to Write a Phenomenological Dissertation) and Cheryl Tatano Beck (Introduction to Phenomenology: Focus on Methodology) are practical and timely contributions to the enterprise of qualitative (or applied) phenomenology.
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EXTENDED REVIEW ESSAY: Healing and Re-imagining the United States in the Time of Trump

Image of the cover of the bookImage of the cover of the bookElliot Benjamin reviews The Depolarization of America: A Guidebook for Social Healing by Kirk J. Schneider, and Re-Imagining America: Finding Hope in Difficult Times by Christopher Schaefer
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REVIEW: Andrea Halewood reviews COVID-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret

Image of the cover of the book

Andrea Halewood writes: Published in June 2020, The Great Reset claims to be a guide to understanding the disruption and suffering caused by the Covid pandemic, as well as to the changes the authors believe necessary to ensure ‘a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward’.
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POETRY – by Graham Mummery

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