ABSTRACT
This chapter is from the book I edited, Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling. It emerged through various changes taking place whereby the state was increasingly controlling the psychological therapies and the chances of a client having a confidential space were rapidly decreasing. At the time, I was also leading a project on the therapeutic use of photographs in prisons (Loewenthal, 2015) and was more forcibly struck than ever before by how therapy was becoming far more of a problem than a solution to individual wellbeing. In particular, it became clearer that the wellbeing of the prisoners I saw and those around them was not just the responsibility of the prisoners, who so often desperately did not want to return on release to where they had come from, but that society also had a socioeconomic responsibility for rehabilitation.
