Explorations of Life in Several Languages

This thesis is a qualitative research study exploring questions of how individuals construct living life in several languages, and of relational issues that arise. It pays attention to subjectivity and its interconnection with language. The study brings together perspectives from linguistics, translation literature, cultural theory, discursive psychology and systemic psychotherapy to consider issues of bilingualism / multilingualism at individual, family and societal levels, and to challenge the ongoing negativity associated with it. Five autobiographies and twenty-four research interviews with individuals who live in several languages form the research data. These insider accounts are treated as both referential and performative, and analysed using a synthesised grounded analysis and discursive analytic approach. It was found that individuals experience themselves differently in each language and construct their languages differently. The study identifies the discursive work individuals carry out in relation to these dissimilarities, such as the way they draw on a construct of a doubled identity, and conceptualise entry into a new language as performance. Individuals use their languages to make salient their own and others' identities. In Britain, speaking a minoritised language acts as a marker of difference and intersects with racialisation, helping to construct ethnicity and cultural identity. Although challenging, individuals develop strategies of hybridisation in enabling contexts, using the interaction between their different languages to create new perspectives, and see their multiplicity as advantage. Issues for families speaking several languages are discussed. Parents found first languages lent intimacy to parenting relationships; second languages conferred distance which helped avoid unhelpful interactions. The concept of 'mother tongue' is constitutive, perceived as language for mothers, and contributes to fathers using their first languages less. The thesis argues how crucial it is for psychotherapists to explore the differential effects of language on subjectivity and relationships, neglected to date, and for the importance of supporting bi/multilingualism

Living in several languages: Language, gender and identities

Living in several languages encompasses experiencing and constructing oneself differently in each language. The research study on which this article is based takes an intersectional approach to explore insider accounts of the place of language speaking in individuals’ constructions of self, family relationships and the wider context. Twenty-four research interviews and five published autobiographies were analysed using grounded theory, narrative and discursive analysis. A major finding was that learning a new language inducted individuals into somewhat ‘stereotyped’ gendered discourses and power relations within the new language, while also enabling them to view themselves differently in the context of their first language. This embodied process could be challenging and often required reflection and discursive work to negotiate the dissimilarities, discontinuities and contradictions between languages and cultures. However, the participants generally claimed that their linguistic multiplicity generated creativity. Women and men used their language differences differently to ‘perform their gender’. This was particularly evident in language use within families, which involved gendered differences in the choice of language for parenting – despite the fact that both men and women experience their first languages as conveying intimacy in their relationships with their children. The article argues that the notion of ‘mother tongue’ (rather than ‘first language’) is unhelpful in this process as well as in considering the implications of living in several languages for systemic therapy

Challenges and impossibilities of 'standing alongside' in an intolerable context: Learning from refugees and volunteers in the Calais camp.

This article describes the experience of setting up a psychosocial and therapeutic support project in the French Calais refugee camp, by a group of family therapists and clinical psychologists from the United Kingdom. This came about in response to reports of a humanitarian crisis unfolding on our doorstep, with the British government's lack of support for the growing numbers of refugees gathering along the UK border with France. The project involved working alongside other agencies in the camp to provide psychosocial and resilience-based therapeutic support to unaccompanied young people, women, children and their families and also to many volunteers in the camp. The process of setting up the work is described, as well as the challenges and dilemmas of offering an intervention in extremely unsafe and insanitary conditions, where for most the experience of trauma was ongoing. The project was informed by systemic-narrative practice and community/liberation psychology, which incorporate the political and social context. A narrative framework offered a way of drawing on people's strengths and resources, rooted in their cultural and social histories and helping them connect with preferred identities, which we found to be essential in the context of ongoing crisis

Therapeutic activism: Supporting emotional resilience of volunteers working in a refugee camp

We describe the development of an approach offering emotional support to volunteers who responded to the humanitarian crisis that has left thousands of refugees living in precarious and dangerous conditions across Europe. The Refugee Resilience Collective was set up by a group of therapists drawing on social justice approaches, working on the French–English border. It was recognised that the emotional needs of volunteers were being neglected, putting many at risk of secondary traumatisation and “burnout.” We elaborate ways we set about fostering an environment of self‐care which, we argue, is crucial to sustaining volunteers. We have offered regular consultations to individuals and teams to nurture resilience and the potential for life‐changing growth, to help them manage the challenges of the work and to build their collective resistance to the abusive state system that refugees face. “Doing hope” for others and collective action are crucial components of our approach

Witnessing and bearing witness. On offering systemic consultations and practices of solidarity at the Uyghur Tribunal

The experience of offering therapeutic support to the Uyghur Tribunal held in London in June and September 2021 powerfully brought home the critical variations in the meanings of witnessing and bearing witness and what they entail. In this paper, we explore the role of witnessing through offering systemic consultation to those who have experienced human rights violations and those who have witnessed these accounts and discuss our observations about the healing power of acts of resistance/activism. We are four systemic psychotherapists, with a particular interest in narrative practices, and approaches that foreground social justice. With a concern not to become “failed witnesses” which Jessica Benjamin (2014) describes as “a failure of those not involved in the acts of injury to serve the function of acknowledging and actively countering or repairing the suffering and injury that they encounter as observers in the social world”, we attempt here to communicate our experience of witnessing and joining with, through practices of solidarity, those bearing witness at the People's Tribunal held to hear evidence about China's alleged genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghur, Kazakh and other Turkic Muslim populations

Living in several languages: Language, gender and identities

Living in several languages encompasses experiencing and constructing oneself differently in each language. The research study on which this article is based takes an intersectional approach to explore insider accounts of the place of language speaking in individuals’ constructions of self, family relationships and the wider context. Twenty-four research interviews and five published autobiographies were analysed using grounded theory, narrative and discursive analysis. A major finding was that learning a new language inducted individuals into somewhat ‘stereotyped’ gendered discourses and power relations within the new language, while also enabling them to view themselves differently in the context of their first language. This embodied process could be challenging and often required reflection and discursive work to negotiate the dissimilarities, discontinuities and contradictions between languages and cultures. However, the participants generally claimed that their linguistic multiplicity generated creativity. Women and men used their language differences differently to ‘perform their gender’. This was particularly evident in language use within families, which involved gendered differences in the choice of language for parenting – despite the fact that both men and women experience their first languages as conveying intimacy in their relationships with their children. The article argues that the notion of ‘mother tongue’ (rather than ‘first language’) is unhelpful in this process as well as in considering the implications of living in several languages for systemic therapy

Working from the margins. Conversations on the development of systemic psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic

Features interviews with many current and past members of staff