This essay explores what it might mean to decolonise group analysis through an encounter with Afrikan knowledge systems, written from the position of an implicated subject - a white Afrikaner psychotherapist, living in Europe, reckoning with complicity and loss. Weaving theoretical critique with clinical and community vignettes, it considers how decolonial thought reshapes analytic practice.The essay begins by situating group analysis within its European origins and the structures of coloniality, drawing on Fanon, Spivak, and Santos to highlight the silences and exclusions that persist in analytic discourse. It then turns to Afrikan epistemologies as generative resources: ubuntu reorients recognition as collective responsibility; sankofa reframes silence as a site of return rather than resistance. These dynamics are illustrated through a therapy group's struggle with the misrecognition of a trans woman, and through reconciliation dialogues between elders and youth in a community scarred by violence.Finally, the essay considers implications for training and institutions, emphasising reflexivity, an expanded clinical frame, and a pedagogy willing to linger with paradox, opacity (Glissant's right not to be fully transparent), and discomfort. Group analysis, renewed through Afrikan thought, is framed not as resolution but as an unfinished praxis of becoming-with others.
Choosing to live as a childfree woman is a life decision that is frequently met with cultural stigma. This heuristic inquiry explored my emotional experience and identity development as a childfree woman and trainee therapist within dominant narratives of womanhood and motherhood. I was the sole participant, engaging with the six phases of heuristic inquiry to guide my process. Using free writing and painting, I composed songs that captured the emotion of my lived experience. Arts-based reflexivity and narrative analysis allowed me to give voice to my personal and professional journey. The creative process helped me connect deeply with my emotions and three central themes emerged: I feel stigma, I feel connected, and I feel empowered. These captured the tension between self-doubt and professional confidence during my psychotherapy training. This was an entirely personal journey, therefore difficult to generalise. However, this inquiry's findings support using creative methods and self-study to facilitate individual development as a way of exploring professional and personal psychotherapeutic identity.
This paper is my response to five papers accepted for the Prize Essay Special Edition, which it attempts to bracket together under the heading 'the only point of importance is the unknown'.
In 1989, the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) commissioned Orlinsky and R & oslash;nnestad to conduct collaborative research into the professional development of psychotherapists. They found that psychotherapists who have been practising for 15+ years were more likely to report positively on their work with clients. Taking this into account, the objective of this study was to explore in richer detail how psychotherapists who have been practising for at least this duration of time considered that their way of working with clients has changed over the years. Five such psychotherapists were invited, in one-to-one interviews, to ponder their earliest cases through to those in the present day. The study employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore the interviews' commonalities and nuances, out of which emerged three themes: the five psychotherapists felt that they have come to rely less upon theory and more upon the spontaneity of their interactions with clients; that the removal of external pressures such as training requirements has enabled them to develop their skills in ways idiosyncratically aligned with themselves; but that their practices continued to be influenced by vulnerabilities from their pasts. Such findings may be of interest to anyone involved in the study of psychotherapists' practices over time.
Every act of knowing in psychotherapy is also an act of power. This paper, organised around five contributions to the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling student essay competition, approaches the tension between knowing too little and knowing too much through the lens of epistemic authority - who is granted the right to know, to theorise, and to name. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's account of epistemic injustice, alongside 'epistemic capture' and the 'epistemic bottleneck', psychotherapy is situated as a practice caught between its liberatory aspirations and its epistemological architecture. The five papers are read as a constellation - not to smooth their differences but to let them illuminate one another across decoloniality, neurodivergence, therapist development, lived identity, and neuroplasticity. The mix of epistemic insufficiency and excess is considered as a potential colonisation of intersubjective space, where forms of knowing can foreclose and distort what might otherwise emerge between people. At stake is the possibility of an encounter that can remain open to the yet-to-be-named. The review proposes an 'ethics of unknowing' as a structural complement to epistemic justice: a discipline of restraint attending to the harms of knowing too much in the wrong way, as well as too little.
This paper examines the fruitful dialogue between neuroscience and psychotherapy, with particular attention to the therapeutic possibilities revealed by the concept of neuroplasticity. It argues that neuroscientific insights into the brain's malleability enrich psychotherapeutic and philosophical understandings of subjectivity, embodiment, trauma, and attachment, while resisting the risk of reducing complex human experience to neural mechanisms. Neuroplasticity is presented not only as a biological fact but as a therapeutic framework that can legitimise somatic forms of knowing, situate the self as relational and dynamic, and affirms the brain's enduring capacity for change and hope. The paper considers how neuroscience both confirms and extends psychotherapeutic traditions, offering material evidence for the transformative power of attunement, containment, and relationship. It also emphasises the necessity of holding space for mystery, ambiguity, and the irreducibly human textures found in the in-between moments of the therapy space.
Autistic and neurodivergent clients frequently experience relational and epistemic harm in psychotherapy when neurotypical therapists' interpretations of emotional expression and communication rely on unexamined normative assumptions. While research increasingly documents autistic clients' experiences of invalidation and misattunement, few studies interrogate therapists' underlying assumptions that shape these encounters. Grounded in the neurodiversity paradigm, the Double Empathy Problem, and frameworks of epistemic injustice, this qualitative study uses semi-structured interviews with 8-12 UK-based neurotypical therapists. Reflexive Thematic Analysis is employed to explore both explicit and latent themes in therapists' interpretations of neurodivergent communication and emotion, including responses to vignettes depicting client behaviour. Findings aim to uncover the normative, ableist frameworks embedded in training and practice that perpetuate misunderstanding and relational harm. By centring therapists' perspectives alongside critical theory, this research illuminates structural and ethical dimensions of therapeutic work, offering insights to support more inclusive, responsive, and ethically grounded practice with neurodivergent clients.
This essay employs Radical TA theory and deconstructionism to explore the psychology of unconscious biases. The author's own upbringing, in communist Romania during the 1980s, and the widespread discrimination against the Roma are used as a case study. Antiziganism is interpreted both as a symbolic abhorrence we hold against our own potential to fall and become outsiders and as a fixated 'I'm not OK, you're not OK' life position, in extreme cases relating to hamartia. The role of authoritarianism is explored in relation to different levels of script (societal, cultural and individual) while dissidence is seen as relying on direct input from a proposed metascript level: humanity at large + the ecosystem. The term Other is capitalised throughout the essay to denote the tensions between I/us and another ethnic, gender, racial, etc., group. Gypsy and Roma are used to represent historical discrimination (the former) and the politically correct address (the latter) according to context.
This paper examines the integration of cultural sensitivity, cultural insight, cultural attunement as post-colonial methodologies in contemporary psychotherapy. It interrogates the feasibility and implications of cultural competence, asking: Can a therapist possess meaningful knowledge of all cultures? And, what does it mean to be culturally attuned and informed in therapeutic practice? As clients increasingly seek cultural awareness and recognition in the clinical space, this shift challenges both European and non-European practitioners to reflect on their framework and assumptions. Cultural nuances may be difficult to grasp unless a therapist shares a similar culture, religion, or tradition with the client. The therapist's curiosity may be received as genuine interest or as ignorance and a lack of knowledge. This may have a potential risk of positioning the client as an educator and reinforcing their experience of otherness. Drawing on theorists such as Lowe and Samuels, the paper cultivates what Lowe terms a 'thinking space' and Samuels regards as a reflective terrain of contemplation and critique. Through personal reflections, clinical vignettes, and critical engagement with post-colonial psychoanalytical thought, the paper contributes to a growing discourse that reimagines the analytic field through a decolonising and cultural lens.
