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The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.
If we substitute psychotherapy or psychoanalysis for philosophy is this an adequate summary of the therapeutic project or is there, as the writers under review suggest, a viable alternative?
The above volumes have much in common and share an infrastructure on various levels. As well as representing attempts to explore the vexed relationship between the psychological and the political world as experienced and as theorised, the writer of one book is also the editor of a series (Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State, General Editor Peter Leonard) of which The Politics of Mental Health is a companion work. Both books share one basic assumption, namely the necessity for transforming social relations for all not merely those who may be suffering more obviously. In order for change to take place it is equally necessary to replace bourgeois theory in any given discipline area with a critical social theory that may in turn inform and guide a practice (in social work, psychology or psychiatry and any related endeavour) in a truly humane and ‘progressive’ direction. In Leonard's terms the central issue of how individuals are constructed under certain historical conditions is a ‘problem of being unable to produce a biographical account of a specific individual from within Marxist categories’ (Leonard , p. 5). He notes that this problem has either been avoided (as in those models consigned to the dustbin of bourgeois psychology) or has been faced unsuccessfully (as in Sartre's union of materialism and existentialism).
These particular statements of critical social theory deserve some sort of full and critical exposition but before attempting this I should perhaps explain why I think this approach to psychotherapy and allied trades demands consideration.
Firstly, the omnipotent desire to achieve a full and complete, a ‘totalised’ understanding of the wo