Editorial Collective

We are pleased to introduce the members of the  Self & Society Editorial Collective

Jennifer Maidman writes:

Jennifer Maidman is a full time musician and songwriter, a very occasional actress and a part time counsellor in private practice in East Kent.

After her first experience on stage at the age of seven (playing Mary in a school nativity play), she went on to play child and adolescent parts with the Renegades, the East London theatre company from which Ken Campbell also emerged. In the seventies she worked both as a musician and as a recording engineer on hits including Marc Bolan’s “I Love to Boogie”. She has worked with many well known artists including Joan Armatrading, Gerry Rafferty, David Sylvian, The Proclaimers, Shakespears Sister, Bonnie Raitt, Van Morisson and Sam Brown and appeared on numerous recordings. She wrote several songs with Boy George including “No Clause 28″ ( which was banned by the BBC!) and has also written for other artists. She was a member of the original Penguin Cafe Orchestra for many years. She produced two chart topping albums by Irish singer songwriter Paul Brady, and Linda McCartney’s solo album “Wide Prairie”. Jennifer has also produced and played on several albums with her partner, trombonist Annie Whitehead. She featured in a BBC4 documentary about Robert Wyatt entitled “Free Will and Testament” and also played guitar and accordion on Robert’s  Mercury award nominated album “Cuckooland”. Film work includes “All the Little Animals” with John Hurt and  ”Bass Desires” directed by Vic Ryder and Stacey Makishi. She appeared in “Strange Cargo”, a groundbreaking theatrical piece exploring ‘extreme bodily experience’, produced and directed by Diverse City. She is currently touring and recording in France with Murray Head and working on her own material for future release.

Jennifer has had a long standing interest in creativity, therapy and human potential going back to her experience at Arthur Janov’s Primal Centre in Los Angeles in the late seventies. She is a trained humanistic counsellor registered with BACP, a member of the ‘Leonard Piper’ group of the Independent Practitioners Network and has written for Therapy Today and Self and Society.   Contact [email protected]

David Kalisch writes:

I’ve been involved with Humanistic Psychology, in one way or another, since 1973, when I started my first therapy with a Canadian Gestaltist at Community Growth Centre, in those distant days when Humanistic Psychology was to be experienced, breathed, felt and expressed rather than a course of study leading to a Diploma, with an experiential component attached. I underwent my first experiential trainings in Humanistic groups in the 1970s in North Devon, where there was no set reading, no written assignments and no Diplomas as such. What a different world!

I’ve been in private practice in the South West of England for nearly 25 years, having informally trained in Neo-Reichian Gestalt in the late 1970s and subsequently, more formally, in Core Process Psychotherapy in the late 1980s. I work with individuals and couples and have been a Supervisor for nearly 20 years. I started my therapeutic practice essentially as a Group Therapist running groups at a Mental Health Centre in Exeter, and my own Gestalt Groups in various venues in the South West.

From 1990 as Director of The Centre for Humanistic Psychology and Counselling, I developed and ran courses for Exeter College in Gestalt Therapy, Counselling Skills, a one year Introduction to Humanistic Psychology and then a two year Diploma in Humanistic Counselling which ran successfully for many years, under different tutors. With colleagues Andrew Forrester and latterly Jenny Dawson, we then concentrated on developing and running independent Professional Trainings in Gestalt Therapy and, more recently, Gestalt Groupwork, and have also run, in the past, introductions to Gestalt and other shorter personal growth courses.

The main influences on my therapeutic approach are Gestalt Therapy, bodywork approaches, modern trauma approaches, transpersonal work and psychoanalytic and existential thinking.

I am an Affiliate member of UKAHPP, have served, briefly, on the board as Southwest representative, and am an ordinary member of BACP. I am a qualified and accredited EFT practitioner.

Richard House writes

Until recently I was Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling at the University of Roehampton, recently being appointed Senior Lecturer in Education Studies (Early Childhood) at the University of Winchester. I’m a chartered psychologist (BPS), with a wide range of interests, including the professionalisation of psychotherapy and counselling, critical/post-psychiatry, the politics of ‘evidence’, early-years learning and policy-making, the psychodynamics of learning and teaching, research and the ‘audit culture’, and holistic/transformative and post-structural/postmodern approaches to learning, education and research.

Working as a counsellor-therapist for almost 20 years, my practice was deeply rooted in humanistic thinking.  I’m a founder-member of the Independent Practitioners Network (Leonard Piper Group). I am also a founder-member of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy, an independent, cross-modality organisation of therapy practitioners committed to helping protect the diversity and independence of psychotherapy and counselling.

I’m a committed campaigner on childhood, being a founder-member of Open EYE, a campaign with a high media profile formed in late 2007 to challenge the government’s compulsory pre-school curriculum, the Early Years Foundation Stage, and, more recently, Early Childhood Action (see www.earlychildhoodaction.com).

I’ve worked in publishing for some 30 years, being founding-editor in 2000 of Hawthorn Press’s acclaimed Early Years Series. My published books include Implausible Professions (co-editor, Nick Totton; PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 1997/2011); Therapy Beyond Modernity (Karnac Books, London, 2003); Against and For CBT (co-editor, Del Loewenthal; PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 2008); Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos (co-editor, Del Loewenthal; Karnac Books, London, 2009); In, Against and Beyond Therapy (PCCS Books, 2010); and Too Much, Too Soon? (Hawthorn Press, Stroud, 2011). I write regularly for the academic therapy literature, and for the early years professional literature, including regular columns in The Mother and Teach Nursery magazines. I’m Associate Editor of Psychotherapy and Politics International and Theory Editor of the European Journal for Psychotherapy and Counselling.

I am passionate about a lot of things; but my greatest passion of all is to create a space in which all voices can be heard – even if at least some of those voices are saying things that I don’t personally like. This is a core principle that I wish to bring to my editorship of this journal and its wonderful history – for as one of my greatest heroes, William Blake, so poignantly wrote, ‘Without contraries is no progression’

Get involved

We would like to invite your participation in the journal’s development on two levels:

1.  if you think you could offer editorial abilities to the journal and would therefore like to propose yourself as a member of the new editorial board,  contact  [email protected];

2. if you should have any ideas for the content, style or design of the new journal, do please send them to us  ([email protected]) . They can either be endorsements of, challenges to or developments of, the tentative ideas we’ve listed above. Or they might be genuinely new ideas and innovations that we’ve not even thought of. All suggestions are warmly welcomed!

Articles, letters and conference reports to for submission should be sent to  [email protected]

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