The action plan

There are a number of actions that are central to the Network. We think it is crucial to:

• We believe clients need the option to explore personal meaning the opportunity for which is increasingly being lost .
• ‘The human soul comes before science and techology’. We must challenge ideologies that get in the way of this truth.
• We think it crucial to remember that we are all capable of good and evil.
• We must have therapeutic spaces available where we can explore how we constrict ourselves and others through our sexuality and violence,  morality and economic systems.
• People may involve themselves in order to forget their troubles, but both psychotherapists and clients can manipulate this in a degenerate way.
• We need multiple stories of suffering otherwise our minds and actions are colonised.
• We must question received wisdoms of what a good therapy outcome looks like
• We must attend to power inequalities, and disobey normal rules and conventions. To influence, we must talk in ways people understand not rarified jargon.
• We believe that increased state regulation may give new capacities for resistance, and that the development of new talking spaces need not be called therapy.
• We believe talking therapists can be as much the problem than the solution.
• Politics can get replaced by scepticism and capitalism by modernity.

We are too caught up with individualism, pseudoscience and the language of medicine and clinical psychology. We need to refind and develop our own language.

These actions points are adapted from Del’s chapter in Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling but are very much a work in progress. Please add your comments below, and help us develop.