I have read the special issue of Forum and really appreciated the fact that
critical voices within clinical psychology were getting a platform. I
personally find that I am becoming increasingly critical and 'social' in my
practice; a stance that makes a lot of sense working in a learning
disability team with poor white and Bangladeshi individuals and families in
the East End of London.
I wanted to raise a query about whether systemic family therapy approaches
mesh well with a community/social materialist/critical perspective. One of
the articles was very critical of narrative therapies, like systemic family
therapy an approach that owes a fair bit of its theoretical underpinnings to
social constructionism, implying that they focused on enabling people to
change their stories about themselves without really examining their social
positions and the wider disadvantages that might be affecting their
wellbeing (makes narrative therapy sound like CBT which I'm not sure is
entirely fair). The author(s) also raised problems with the underlying
moral/ontological relativism of social constructionism. The article (was it
by Bob Diamond? Not sure as I've misplaced my copy) implied that it was
going to look at systemic approaches too, but didn't get round to it.
Systemic approaches have given me the opportunity to look at people's social
position with them, as well as the chance to be explicit about the impact of
racism, sexism and discrimination against disabled people; to critique
professional power and focus on family's strengths and resources. By the
way, I do think you can be a social constructionist and still accept that
there are structural inequalities which stand in the way of fair access to
social and economic benefits.
Any thoughts on this? One of my responses to the special issue, which I'm
sure has been often lobbed at critical/community approaches is that it was
strong on critique and analysis, but left me wanting more ideas about
interventions. could systemic approaches fill some of that gap?
Deborah
----- Original Message -----
From: "Diamond Bob" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 10:16 AM
Subject: Special issue of Clinical Psychology Forum - Critical & Community
Psychology
We'd like to let the list know about the recent special issue of
Clinical Psychology Forum, June, entitled 'Critical & Community
Psychology'. We hope people will be interested in looking at the special
issue but we would like to point out that, as a discussion group, we
consider a more suitable title would be - 'Social Materialist
Psychology'. Also, the papers in the special edition do not appear in
the sequence they were submitted. For those interested, we had intended
the papers to appear in the following order:
Introduction
That was then this is now
Reflections on practice
Fundamental questions for psychology
The trouble with psychotherapy
Lost for words
Reconstructing the person
Implications for practice
The issue also inadvertently described the authors as the Midlands
Critical and Community Psychology group. We hope there won't be any
confusion between the existing West Midlands Critical & Community
Psychology group and the current authors of the special issue.
John Cromby
Bob Diamond
Paul Kelly
Paul Moloney
Penny Priest
David Smail
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