Philosophical Foundations of Psychotherapy promotes a critical awareness of the history of ideas, and how cultural, social and political theories inform and shape what we do as relational counselling and psychotherapy practitioners.
It seeks to recover the dialogic ideal of the Platonic notion that "relationships heal" and traverse the relational contours of history through to contemporary thinkers (e.g., McLeod, Slife, Gergen, Gadamer, Taylor, Habermas). The book will demystify technical vocabularies, emphasising the fact we are moral beings living in the real world. It will challenge the unhelpful misconception that philosophy is for philosophers alone. Human reality is too complex for counsellors and psychotherapists to be unaware of the foundations, difficulties and contradictions within our value systems, ethics and philosophical assumptions about what we do. Broader, contemporary themes to be discussed include:
- Key debates in gender, sexuality and feminism.
- Post-Covid ethics - engaging with technology in ethical ways.
- The environment - alternatives to our dominant conceptions of life and nature.
- Our neoliberal selves - understanding capitalism and the ethics of authenticity.
- Europeans and decolonisation - Western and non-Western postcolonial and decolonial critiques.
Emerging from a series of lectures about the philosophical foundations of counselling and psychotherapy addressed to postgraduate trainees, this book is primarily for trainee counsellor and psychotherapists, practitioners and trainers who wish to teach the subject. For this reason, the text will be useful for those teaching research methods, the practice of research supervision, reflexivity and personal development, across areas related to mental health.
