Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Therapy (But Were Afraid to Ask): Fragments of a Critical Psychotherapy

Abstract

Three seemingly consensual propositions concerning psychotherapy and counselling are examined critically. All turn out to be unreliable, tendentious and even damaging. First, psychotherapy and counselling can be free and independent professions provided that therapists, acting together, fight for them to be that way. Second, psychotherapy and counselling are private and personal activities, operating in the realms of feelings and emotions - the psyche, the unconscious, affects rooted in the body. Above all other factors, the single most important thing is the therapy relationship between two people. Third, psychotherapy and counselling are vocations, not jobs. Therapists are not simply motivated by money. In developing critiques of these propositions, the chapter utilises social, political and economic perspectives. It reviews new clinical thinking on the active role of the client in therapeutic process and suggests that a turn to the legendary figure of the trickster might be of benefit to the field. The chapter locates its arguments in the author's experience of the politics and practices of psychotherapy and counselling, and engages in self-criticism.