Implausible Professions: Arguments for Pluralism and Autonomy in Psychotherapy and Counselling

Richard House Ph.D. is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling, Department of Psychology and the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University. A trained counsellor and psychotherapist and a therapy practitioner since 1990, his books include In, Against and Beyond Therapy (PCCS, 2010), Therapy Beyond Modernity (Karnac, 2003), Against and For CBT (co-editor Del Loewenthal, PCCS, 2008) and Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos (co-editor Del Loewenthal, Karnac, 2009). Richard is a co-founder of the Independent Practitioners Network, in which he has participated since 1995, and of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy against State Regulation. Richard is also a trained Steiner Kindergarten and class teacher, co-founding the 'Open EYE' early childhood campaign in 2007, and, with author Sue Palmer, co-orchestrating the two press Open Letters on 'toxic childhood' and 'play' in 2006 and 2007, helping to precipitate a global media debate about the state of childhood in modern technological culture. Nick Totton is a psychotherapist and trainer in private practice in Leeds, UK. Trained originally as a Reichian therapist, he now practises and teaches his own synthesis, Embodied-Relational Therapy, drawing on psychoanalysis and Process Oriented Psychology as well as on Reichian ideas. He has published The Water in the Glass: Body and Mind in Psychoanalysis (Rebus Press); Psychotherapy and Politics (Sage); Character and Personality Types (Open University Press, with Michael Jacobs; and Body Psychotherapy: An Introduction (Open University Press), as well as editing Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal: Lands of Darkness (Karnac). He is editor of the journal Psychotherapy and Politics International (Wiley). Nick is in a prospective member group (the Burley Group) of the Independent Practitioners' Network