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The following is a brief report about one of the psychotherapeutic/social action organizations that I have helped to found in the UK—Psychotherapists and Counselors for Social Responsibility (hereafter PCSR). It's a report, not a theoretical statement or a history of such organizations, which have existed or do exist in many countries. Inevitably, the report has its parochial features, and I will let readers work out how what follows does or does not align with their own experiences in their particular locations.
The long-standing desire on the part of many psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to make a contribution to the alleviation of social as well as personal distress has often foundered when it comes to the matter of organization.1 Psychotherapists are incorrigibly disputatious, and pervasive worries about ‘neutrality’ contribute to a picture in which the intent to bring “therapy thinking” into a wider world is undermined. There may also be conscious or unconscious wishes to conform to whatever standards seem to fit with the prevailing ideology of the day (see Jacoby). In general, then, it has not been easy to find an organizational vocabulary that will articulate “therapy for the world” in the face of the world's indifference or even hostility to what can sometimes seem crass psychological theorizing about complicated sociocultural and political conflicts. In my view, it is because politics involves conflict and struggle that it is so difficult to work out a psychotherapeutic approach; therapists tend to seek a pre-existing internal or external conflict that a client is experiencing, so as to explore or mediate or synthesize such conflict which, pace relationality and intersubjectivity, is not often one they are involved in as direct participants. We are better at being thirds in any bilateral conflict situation—“why don't you and he fight?,” as the bar wit put it.
Our record in terms of political awareness and respect for difference and diversity, whether sexua