Therapy Futures

* Book: Therapy Futures. Denis Postle. Lulu.com, 2012

URL = Lulu

Description

"Therapy Futures introduces two benchmarks for therapy renewal, one is valuing love as the active ingredient of therapy and secondly, that we all inhabit a psyCommons, a thriving fountain of streetwise, savvy ‘know-how’, ‘know-when’ and ‘know-if’, through which millions of people get through life. Therapists distill expertise about the human condition from the psyCommons and sequester it in professions.

Therapy Futures tells how the psychological therapies diligently sought state backing for these professional enclosures and how this ambition failed. The case study that narrates this history is a story of ‘couch wars’, and a narrow escape from capture by a state agency.

These contests for terrain look set to run and run but do they have to?

Therapy Futures outlines an alternative, a transition that waves goodbye to professionalization and moves towards forms of psycho-practice based on inquiry, equipotency and love."

Review

Michael Riley:

"Postle’s book is about psychotherapy but it contains a back-story that should draw the interest of both organisational and identity theorists. It is a story of attrition that speaks directly to any discourse on the individual and groups. Here a bureaucratic institution and an organic network do battle over attempts by the former to conjoin the classification of psychological distress with occupational specification.

The social forces in play, power, legitimacy and identity, are woven into a coherent narrative that raises questions as to how a Weberian entity copes when what is at stake is both unquantifiable and contested and it asks how a network, without leadership, can successfully challenge an institutional policy."