List of Contributors

Lesley Ash (pseudonym) qualified as a psychotherapist in 1991. Her own psychotherapy was disrupted and the journey to understand why this should be so disturbing and to find a resolution took many years. She has maintained an interest in the effect of disrupted psychotherapeutic relationships and has worked with several clients to help them to address and resolve the disappointed hope that results from therapeutic impasse. Email: josephschwartz@btinternet.com

Dick Blackwell is a Group Analyst, Family Therapist and Organisation Consultant who works in private practice, and with a number of voluntary organizations. He graduated in Business Administration in 1971 having been a participant in the struggles for ‘student power’ and ‘third world’ development. Dick trained as a teacher, and worked as a researcher on Youth and Community Work with Black Youth in Inner Cities in the early 1970s. He worked in ‘suicide prevention’ in the voluntary sector, before training as a group analyst and as a family therapist, and leading a community mental health project that provided psychotherapy for a range of psychiatric patients who were not regarded as ‘suitable for psychotherapy’. For the last twenty years Dick has worked with torture survivors at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture. He has recently been working with Centrepoint on the needs of homeless young people, and is Consultant in Group and Family Psychotherapy at the Baobab Centre for Young Survivors in Exile, working with child and adolescent refugees. Dick is author of Counselling and Psychotherapy with Refugees, and has written numerous articles on psychotherapy, politics and culture. Email:

Mary Courchene is a First Nations Ojibway woman, originally from Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, Canada, but has lived in an urban setting in Winnipeg for over thirty years. A residential school survivor, Ms Courchene has struggled to pursue educational opportunities in a non-aboriginal