ABSTRACT
For many years I encouraged my students to carry out different forms of qualitative research as well as encouraging them to question this once having done it. I was also first Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy’s Research Committee and edited with David Winter What is Psychotherapeutic Research? (2006). In subsequently writing Case Studies in Relational Research (2007), I also tried to look at alternative approaches, mainly a case study approach (with Dennis Greenwood) and the use of reverie (with Julia Cayne). I was therefore tempted to include examples of their work, namely Greenwood and Loewenthal (2004) and Cayne and Loewenthal. (2011). There is also Jo Gee’s (2011) development of this latter approach, when considering Kierkegaard’s notion of despair for working in prisons. Other examples of papers I originally thought of including were the work with Patrick Larsson and Onel Brooks on schizophrenia and counselling psychology (2012), considering using Foucauldian discourse analysis. A further important paper for considering interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA)’s use of Heidegger was Betty Bertrand’s (2011) ‘Delivering therapy in prison: an IPA study researching the lived experience of psychotherapists and counsellors’. Another paper is with Cath Altson and Anastasios Gaitanidis (2015), exploring non-IAPT therapists working in an IAPT service. There are many more and I also was initially interested to include my chapter on ‘Audit, audit culture and therapeia: some implications for wellbeing with particular reference to children’ in Moutsou and King (2010), but there were two problems. First, there was more than enough material here for a book in its own right. Second was my growing conviction that current fashions in research were inappropriate and, while they may help develop certain capacities of the individual student, were primarily detrimental rather than beneficial for thoughtful practice.
