Systemic Means to Subversive Ends: Maintaining the Therapeutic Space as a Unique Encounter

Abstract

Psychotherapy has become a marketplace for an increasing number of approaches, many with wildly different perspectives on what it means to suffer, or even whether an approach focused on cure is possible. This chapter argues that within this marketplace the growth of an ideology that privileges notions of 'illness', 'cure' and 'evidence-based treatment' can be problematic for the critical practitioner who wishes to maintain space for more subversive approaches. There is also concern that with academic training programmes being increasingly subject to external pressure, there is a move to the mainstream and away from critical thinking. The author describes how she incorporated systemic techniques and ideas into a doctoral training programme in order to help to maintain a space for practice-driven psychotherapy to flourish. These include facilitating a tolerance of uncertainty, of challenging trainees' mindsets and of connecting with the psychiatric survivor movement. The author suggests that we either see ourselves as trapped and excluded by the dominant culture, or we recognise the extraordinary work that is going on in the survivor movement and in cyberspace and draw these into our everyday psy interactions. If we choose the latter, we can produce spaces that may incorporate multiple stories on 'evidence', 'illness' and the other signifiers that otherwise threaten to colonise us.