About this Blog

'The Impossible Profession'
Towards 21st century Psychotherapy

Introduction to this Blog

This blog started its life about 4 years ago, when I first wrote a short piece on taking the quip of psychotherapy as the 'impossible profession' seriously, that is to say: as pointing to some essential feature of our work that adds a special twist to our profession and distinguishes it from others helping professions.
That first version was published on my INTEGRA CPD website when it first launched in 2009. In 2013 I was then invited to commit myself to writing regular monthly instalments for Psychotherapy Excellence, the UK portal for continuing professional development for counsellors and psychotherapists.

These blog posts were written in sequence, building on each other and are best read in the order in which they were written. So you can use the ChronoBlog gadget I have installed at the top of this blog's Home page, to help you navigate through the blog posts in sequence. Or you can use the download links in the sidebar to download the blog posts in pdf-format.

The future of this blog

My aim with this blog is to address and investigate basic principles of the psychotherapeutic field, relevant across the approaches and modalities. I have the idea that we are ready to - as well as urgently need to - formulate the whole edifice of psychotherapeutic theory and practice again from the ground up. Based on an understanding of the paradoxically impossible nature of the therapeutic endeavour, and a 21st century perspective which is not caught in 19th and 20th-century dualisms, we may be able to formulate an integrative theory that is 'experience-near', embodied and does justice both to the simplicity of ordinary human relating at the same time as embracing the complexity of the human psyche.

So my intention is to unfold - in response to your comments and replies - a perspective that may be characterised by the following key principles (which - to keep them brief - do have a bit of a sound-bite flavour):
integrative: drawing from the gifts and wisdoms of all the approaches of the therapeutic field (rather than eclectically cherry-picking ones that suit me), even though they are not only diverse and plural, but often contradictory and sometimes mutually exclusive, i.e. I am working towards a broad-spectrum integration that embraces the historical and philosophical fragmentation of the field, without by-passing the original and continuing fertile conflicts and contradictions. One of my favourite phrases over the last 20 years has been that the field of psychotherapy reflects in its fragmentation and diversity the psyche of its clients/patients as well as its practitioners - psychotherapy as a discipline is a parallel process to the modernpsyche itself. Finding a way of embracing the historical wounds of the field which does not privilege or discount certain partial approaches seems our avenue into an appreciation of the wounded healer dictum: physician, heal thyself. Gathering the fragments of the field may recover a paradoxical sense of wholeness that does not deny brokenness.

embodied: following in the trail-blazing paradigm shifts of our sister discipline neuroscience, we may be ready to formulate a psychological understanding of therapeutic relating that is not restricted to the 'talking therapies', does not only rely on verbal interaction and the reflective mind, and is not built upon implicit dualistic mind-over-body assumptions, i.e. I am working towards a psychological theory and practice that is rooted in bodymind integration (neuro-bio-psycho-social systemic holism, for want of a better phrase).

relational: whilst there is abundant confusion about what this term means (with quite contradictory relational styles and therapeutic modalities each claiming the term for themselves), there also is a growing consensus over the inexorable recognition that two people's psyches are involved in therapy, whether we like it or not; in Martha Stark's influential term: two-person psychology has firmly arrived and is here to stay, with all the complications that then arise between person and role, transference and countertransference, I-I and I-it modes of relating; i.e. I am working towards doing justice to the vicissitudes and complexities of human relating and its multi-dimensionality which arise in therapy as they tend to do in any committed, ongoing relationship - especially when we take into account unconscious processes (whilst I recognise that this is a controversial term, I am using it here in the widest non-technical sense, as pointing to everything that is systematically out of our awareness - the vast spectrum of such processes is so central to my view of our work that it might well deserve its own sound-bite heading).

systemic: whilst there are a variety of therapy approaches which define themselves as systemic or as informed by a systemic perspective, I use the term here in a wider sense, drawing from the whole history and tradition of the systems view throughout the sciences, including chaos and complexity as well as general systems theories, which have been usefully applied especially to family systems. I can't really imagine any 21st century discipline without this as one of its pillars. One of the key principles which derives from this in our field is the idea of 'parallel process' which will become an important idea as we proceed.

integral: recognising the traditional tendencies for all kinds of disciplines to privilege and absolutise their respective paradigms and bias, Wilber's integral perspective attempts to develop a less blinkered and more inclusive and comprehensive stance; I take that to be a worthy orientation, and will occasionally draw on the ideas and formulations of the integral movement - without making a religion out of it.