Engaging with a history of counselling, spirituality and faith in Scotland: a readers' theatre script

This paper presents an abbreviated version of a verbatim script developed from oral history interviews with individuals key to the development of counselling and psychotherapy in Scotland from 1960 to 2000. Earlier versions were used in workshops with counsellors and pastoral care practitioners to share counter-narratives of counselling and to provide opportunities for conversations about historical and contemporary relationships between faith, spirituality, counselling and psychotherapy. By presenting intertwined histories in a readers' theatre script, the narrative nature of lives lived in context was respected. By bringing oral histories into virtual dialogue with each other and with contemporary practitioners, whether through workshops or through publications, the interplay between individual, institutional and societal narratives remains visible and open to change

Gender and the Reality of Cities: embodied identities,social relations and performativities

Gender is an integral, ubiquitous and taken-for-granted aspect of urban life. It is an influential dimension of urban identities, an axis of urban inequalities, and it animates the everyday practices that characterise and constitute cities and city life. Perhaps because it is so familiar and taken-for-granted, gender is also a complex and slippery idea that carries a range of inter-related meanings. Numerous commentators (including, for example, Haraway 1991; Moi 1999; Widerberg 1999) have pointed to problems of translation, even between closely related European languages. In addition, usage within particular languages is far from singular, stable or coherent. In this essay, I do not attempt to engage with issues of translation between languages, focusing solely on anglophone urban studies, but I do wish to acknowledge that, however influential they may be, the meanings of gender in anglophone contexts are also idiosyncratic1. Setting these considerations to one side, I explore some of the different ways in which the idea of gender is used in anglophone urban studies to help explore and understand the simple fact that cities are peopled by women, men, girls and boys, drawing especially, but not exclusively, on British feminist urban geography. More specifically, I consider three kinds of gender analyses of urban life, which approach gender through embodied identities, social relations, and performativity respectively. As a dimension of embodied identities, gender focuses on how everyday urban experiences relate to, and are influenced by, the anatomical categories “male” and “female”. While gender is embodied by human individuals, it does not reside entirely within human bodies but is produced at the intersections between human bodies and the milieux that surround them. As a facet of those surrounding milieux, it constitutes a social relation or organising principle of urban life. For gender to be felt as integral to embodiment and as a social relation that precedes gendered embodiment requires human beings to be recruited into gender categories. In so doing, gendered persons activate meanings or scripts of gender, hence the idea of gender as performatively cited in everyday lives. The different approaches to gender on which I focus are not mutually exclusive, but there are important variations in emphasis between them. Cities are vital arenas in the embodiment, contestation, mobilisation, subversion and transformation of all these aspects of gender. In the sections that follow, I explore how each approach to gender informs understandings of urban life and sheds light on the specificity of cities. In conclusion I point to emotion as an important theme for all three approaches to analysing the gendered reality of cities

Making connections and thinking through emotions: between geography and psychotherapy

The current upsurge of interest in emotions within geography has the potential to contribute to critical perspectives that question conventional limits to scholarship. Three precursors of emotional geographies are discussed in this context (humanistic, feminist and non-representational geographies). Connections between emotional geographies and psychotherapy are explored with a view to resisting the equation of emotion with individualised subjective experience, and developing situated, relational perspectives. Psychotherapy is approached as a theory of practice that accords central importance to affective qualities of relationships, which is shown to be directly relevant to geographical engagements with emotion. The distinction between feelings and representations of feelings is revisited through a discussion of psychotherapeutic meaning-making

Entry for the Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th Edition

Psychoanalytic theory: Entry for the Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th EditionPsychoanalytic theory and practice originated in the late nineteenth century in the work of Sigmund Freud (1956-1939). It offers a distinctive way of thinking about the human mind and of responding to psychological distress. Psychoanalysis has travelled widely from its central European origins, and has evolved into a complex, multi-facetted and internally fractured body of knowledge situated at the interface between the human and natural sciences, and between clinical practice and academic theory. Notwithstanding critiques of its Eurocentric origins, psychoanalysis has been taken up in many different cultural contexts, perhaps most notably in Latin America but also in India, Japan and elsewhere. Its geography and spatiality have become topics for geographical study albeit primarily within the Anglophone literature (Cameron, 2006; Kingsbury, 2003)

The changing landscape of voluntary sector counselling in Scotland

In 1989 the Scottish Health Education Group and the Scottish Association for Counselling compiled a directory of counselling services in Scotland. When asked if they offered counselling, the great majority of voluntary sector organisations in the welfare field said that they did, and they were therefore included in the directory, generating over 500 entries in total, including, among others, all the Citizens Advice Bureaux in Scotland. In 2001, I was involved in the implementation of another survey of voluntary sector counselling, which provided an updated snapshot of provision across the whole of Scotland, and offered the possibility of examining how the availability of voluntary sector counselling had changed since the late 1980s (Bondi et al., 2003a). The 2001 survey solicited a rather different response from the earlier one. Several of the organisations listed in the 1989 directory responded to the 2001 survey by telephoning or writing to stress that they did not offer counselling. For example, a paid worker from Victim Support contacted us to ask us to ignore any returns from local Victims Support groups, insisting that any of them who claimed to offer counselling were wrong. A note from another agency manager stated that “X does not deliver counselling […] and no service user is ever given this impression”. In a similar vein when an interview was conducted with a member of the Samaritans, he began the interview by saying, “I must state now that Samaritans are not counsellors”. These responses provided graphic evidence of a substantial shift in the place of counselling within voluntary sector between the late 1980s, when it had been embraced as a description of a vast array of services designed to meet welfare needs, and the beginning of the twenty-first century when it was understood in much narrower terms from which many organisations actively sought to distance themselves