Narrative Career Therapy (NCT) is recognised in this paper as having relevance for career practitioners who are working to create meaning for their clients in complex work life situations. Re-authoring Career Narratives is described as a practice that involves principles of NCT and these principles contribute to the exploration of agentive…

Personality fixations that have had utility in the past can later become problematic for holistic psychological development. Adult ego development research, combined with psychoanalytic assumptions, provides a way to understand multidimensional maturity through addressing and transforming the unconscious. The Enneagram and Gilbert Durand's…

This article explores the similarities between humanistic (and existential) psychotherapy, represented here by the ideas of Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm and Irvin Yalom, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Despite the ongoing dialogue between both therapies during the last decade, regarding both their convergences and divergences, there is…

Many people with mental health issues are workless; despite this, good quality work is often promoted as beneficial for wellbeing. In this article, I explore my personal reflections about managing my experiences of mental distress in the workplace, whilst working as a senior lecturer in social work in the UK. The potential of Acceptance and…

In this article I investigate creative means to encounter otherness in oneself as a prerequisite for intercultural education. Firstly, I look at ancient Greek philosophy and the concept of self-care. Secondly, I draw from C. G. Jung's individuation as a process of incorporating shadow parts in the self and thirdly I explore psychodramatic methods.…

Post-structuralists argue that personal identity is a function of societal power dynamics. This becomes especially problematic for persons recruited into problem-saturated identities. In this paper, inspired by Foucault's call for us to "create ourselves as a work of art" (p. 262), I explore the therapeutic value of an aesthetic approach…

Bakhtin's [(1981). "The dialogic imagination: Four essays." (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans. M. Holquist, Ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press] concept of the chronotope is used as a lens to view time and place in stories of psycho-spiritual transformation in research and therapy. Distinctions between spirituality,…

The potential for career guidance to impact on well-being has received insufficient attention in the UK. There are both conceptual and empirical reasons to expect that the impacts may be positive, but a lack of evidence directly testing this proposition. Career guidance has commonalities with therapeutic counselling suggesting analogous effects,…

The article addresses the question of whether the practice of mandatory personal therapy, followed by several training organisations, is justified by existing research and evidence. In doing so, it discusses some implications of this training requirement from an ethical and ideological standpoint, raising questions of import for training…

Counselling and psychotherapy is attracting government interest and intervention, for instance the proposal to regulate the profession by the Health Professions Council. Many therapists see this as a threat to its fundamental principles due to the fact that government policy is influenced by the medical model and managerialism. This article looks,…

Recent policy and practice debates about the expansion of the talking therapies in the UK have been concerned with the ideological premise of the programme or with questions of effectiveness, cost-benefit, availability and access. For the most part, however, discussion of the needs and demands for such services has been largely abstracted from any…

As the availability of new communication technologies increases, mental health professionals have incorporated these innovations into their practice and research. Up to now several studies have presented promising results in using the power and convenience of the Internet for clinical care. While multiple contributions focus on the potential and…

Grounded in a narrative account of the author's own development as a counselling practitioner, it is argued that a programmatic developmental path for therapy practitioners can be singularly inappropriate. Such a route to practitionerhood threatens to interfere with, and even fundamentally to undermine, the necessarily unique idiosyncrasies of…

This article represents a poststructuralist critique and review of the role of empathy in the therapeutic relationship. Incorporating Foucauldian contributions, we seek to expand upon the largely liberal-humanistic descriptions about the nature of empathy, which in our view fail to acknowledge fully the impact of culture in the therapy arena. In…