In, Against and Beyond Therapy

In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" challenges the foundations of many of therapy's most take-for-granted and self-serving assumptions. Yet despite its title, it is very far from being yet another anti-therapy book. Rather, the book's central aim is to retrieve what is best in therapy work from what Richard House sees as the pernicious and ultimately deadening forces of institutional professionalisation; credentialism and careerism; 'audit-culture' obsessions with 'evidence-based practice'; and the 'apolitical' psychopathologising of clients - concerns well captured by the term 'the ideology of modernity'. In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" assembles some 15 years of updated critical writings within the broad therapy field, with incisively provocative commentaries on the professionalisation process, the client voice, therapeutic education and training, and research. For practitioners who are highly sceptical about the beneficence of the state regulation of the psychological therapies, this book promises to be a rallying-point for the development of a 'post-professional' therapy culture.It will be indispensable reading for critical psychologists, and for therapists of all persuasions and modalities who value critical thinking and challenge, and who welcome the opportunity to step outside of therapy's conventional, taken-for-granted 'regimes of truth'.