Therapy Futures: Obstacles and opportunities

Therapy Futures introduces two benchmarks for therapy renewal, one is valuing love as the active ingredient of therapy and secondly, that we all inhabit a psyCommons, a thriving fountain of streetwise, savvy ‘know-how’, ‘know-when’ and ‘know-if’, through which millions of people get through life. Therapists distill expertise about the human condition from the psyCommons and sequester it in professions. Therapy Futures tells how the psychological therapies diligently sought state backing for these professional enclosures and how this ambition failed. The case study that narrates this history is a story of ‘couch wars’, and a narrow escape from capture by a state agency. These contests for terrain look set to run and run but do they have to? Therapy Futures outlines an alternative, a transition that waves goodbye to professionalization and moves towards forms of psycho-practice based on inquiry, equipotency and love.