by Beatrice Popescu
Our interviewee is Dr. Richard House, prolific author, editor, educator, psychotherapist and activist in the politics of psycho-practice. Graduating from Oxford University in 1976 (with First Class Honours), Richard House gained a Ph.D. in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia (Norwich) in 1984. After working in publishing he trained as a counsellor/psychotherapist (1987-95), and has worked in the ‘human potential’ field since 1990 in various capacities. He was recently appointed Senior Lecturer (part time) in Psychotherapy and Counselling at Roehampton University, London (Research Centre for Therapeutic Education). He is also a trained Steiner Waldorf class teacher and a Steiner Kindergarten teacher. Richard has been running the Norwich Steiner Parent & Child group since 1998, and also works in the Kindergarten, which was opened at Easter 2001 and which he ran for several years. He is also Series Editor of Hawthorn Press’s cutting-edge ‘Early Years’ series, and recently co-founded the anthroposophical publishing company Ur Publications (Montreal). Richard has been a major contributor to the literature in counselling/psychotherapy since the early 1990s, and he writes regularly for The Mother magazine on child care and educational issues, as well as regularly contributing to Ipnosis, New View, and a range of psychotherapeutic journals. Not least, he conceived and co-edited the critically acclaimed anthologies Implausible Professions: Arguments for Pluralism and Autonomy in Psychotherapy and Counselling (PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye, 1997) and Ethically Challenged Professions: Enabling Innovation and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Counselling (co-edited with Yvonne Bates), and published his book Therapy Beyond Modernity: Deconstructioning and Transcending Profession-Centred Therapy in 2003 (Karnac Books).
Address for correspondence: richardahouse@hotmail.com
EJOP: How did your passion for counseling/therapy develop?
Richard House: Like most of the therapists I know, it began with a personal experience of therapy (in my case, back in the 1980s), which quite quickly became something of a pre-occupation. I had always had a kind of ‘proto-interest’ in psychology – especially radical anti-psychiatry – but which I never really pursued or even understood, until that interest took form and began to crystallize in the wake of my own early group-therapy experiences when I began participating in regular monthly weekend encounter groups – very much grounded in the humanistic, human potential movement. I am faintly embarrassed now when I think back to the rather evangelical way in which I embraced therapy in those early days – how I allowed its world-view to dominate my life, and how insufferable I must have been to a number of friends who were then, and subsequently remained, relatively unenamoured by the influence of therapy. I was seduced and fascinated by the endless complexities, subtleties and mysteries of the human psyche and human relationships more generally – and therapy and its associated literature have proved to be a wonderfully rich and stimulating vehicle for this abiding interest.
EJOP: What prompted you to get involved in the psycho-practice politics?
Richard House: I have always been a political radical – it is a natural position for me, being a younger second born, in Frank Sullaway’s sense (Born to Rebel) – so perhaps unconsciously wishing to overthrow the existing hegemony and balance of power! (I am only half-serious here – of course this is probably one of many factors involved, but I am now also very sceptical of the narrow psychoanalytic and deterministic world-view which accounts like this are rooted in). More specifically, here in Norwich there has always been a very strong radical therapy tradition – with the Halls (Jill and the late Tony), whose wonderful encounter groups I attended for many years, and also Professor Brian Thorne of the Norwich Centre and University of East Anglia. Jill, Tony and Brian were leading lights in the then Norwich Collective, a peer group of innovative therapists, and this group became a leading focus for disquiet at the trend towards the institutional professionalisation of therapy and counselling, which began to gather pace in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I became a founder-member of the so-called Norwich Group Process Group, and helped to organise the two National Conferences on the Dynamics of Accreditation which the group organised. My like-minded colleagues and I were beginning to find ourselves in a scarcely tolerable position, as the professionalising bandwagon gained momentum – for, on the one hand, if we ignored the seeming inexorability of state/statutory regulation, then (‘grandparent’ clauses excepted) we might well be placing ourselves in a position where continuing therapeutic practice might be illegal; and yet by acquiescing in the face of these cultural pressures, we would have done ourselves a kind of ‘soul violence’ which would be both personally and vocationally damaging. These, then, were the deeply challenging dynamics with which my colleagues and I were struggling over this difficult period in the early and mid-1990s.
After meeting for well over a year, the Group Process Group decided to organise a national conference on the dynamics of accreditation. In fact, two conferences were held in successive years (1991 and 1992), and reports of these highly successful events (in which [now Professor] Brian Thorne and group consultant David Wasdell played a leading design and facilitation role) were published in Cannon and Hatfield (Self and Society, 1992) and House (Self and Society, 1992). Around one hundred practitioners from all over Britain attended both events combined, and within a few years at least some of the faces were to appear again and become familiar colleagues and friends with the inauguration of the Independent Therapists Network in 1994. Certainly these were exciting, heady times for all of us – and personally, the Group Process Group was one of the most nourishing, challenging, rich experiential learning environments that I could ever wish to experience.
The institutional ‘madness’ around professionalisation seemed to be infecting everyone in the therapy world: not least the poor unfortunate trainers who seemed to be continually changing the requirements and boundaries of their trainings in mid-stream (good modelling for secure and consistent therapeutic boundaries, I thought!) – much to the understandable chagrin of their long-suffering trainees (myself included), as the training regulations changed even more frequently, it seemed, than government policy on the school curriculum! (and with both processes no doubt being fed by a common cultural dynamics).
With the publication in the mid-1990s of Richard Mowbray’s seminal book The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration (which rightly became the ‘bible’ and the focus of the anti-professionalisation movement) and the consolidation of the Independent Practitioners Network at the same time, I had a ready-made peer group of like-minded radicals with whom to deepen our concerns and develop cogent and incisive critiques of the directions in which therapy was developing. Finally, being something of a compulsive writer, I relished (and still relish) expressing in print my manifold concerns about the way in which therapy as a vocation is understood and pursued in modern culture.
EJOP: How did the professionals react to “Therapy Beyond Modernity”?
Richard House: I would say for the most part, very positively. I know a number of colleagues who are actively engaging with the very same issues I address in the book – that is, how to find a way to be an effective and empowering therapist-healer in an increasingly professionalised environment whose institutional bureaucratic practices threaten to be antithetical to the core values that underpin therapy at its best. But there are also some who are, I think, rather (or perhaps very) threatened by the book – not least, perhaps, because if read in a certain way, it can easily be experienced as undermining the livelihood upon which many practitioners depend. I am sorry about that reaction – for my overriding concern in the book is to pose searching, counter-intuitive questions about therapy, the honest and fearless engagement with which can only strengthen, rather than undermine or subvert, therapy practice. Above all, for me therapy should always be a critical, subverting, potentially revolutionising practice – in that (and at the risk of grandiosity) therapy can and should be playing a central role in the evolution and maturing of human consciousness; and as soon as profession-centred conservatism and any associated normalising or pathologising agendas begin to assert themselves, that is the time to kick over those traces and reassert therapy’s subverting counter-cultural roots, if it is to continue to serve its historically critical task of consciousness evolution, rather than becoming another ‘modernist’ dead-weight upon it.
In terms of book reviews, they have for the most part been very positive indeed, which has been very gratifying. However, with Therapy Beyond Modernity and also Implausible Professions, I have found that in terms of sales, there is perhaps a ‘glass ceiling’ for books like this, for in any professional or vocational field, there will always be a ‘normal distribution’ as far as radicalism is concerned, and the ‘consolidators’ and the Conservatives will always tend to outnumber the innovators. But were it ever so ... - and that just goes with the territory of being a ‘radical’!
EJOP: Is there a price to be paid for being bold and straightforward?
Richard House: That’s a surprising and very interesting question – and I don’t, alas, have the space to answer it as fully as its subtlety deserves! In typical postmodern style, I would say ‘yes’ and ‘no’. ‘Yes’, in the sense that in modern culture, there is a highly pernicious trend towards appearance taking precedence over substance and authenticity – and then anyone who plumps for the latter is in danger of being marginalised, treated as an embarrassment, or even ignored. But ‘no’, in the sense that from my perspective there really is no alternative to honesty and authenticity and telling it how it is – because if I did anything else, I simply wouldn’t want to live with myself.
The ‘retired’ (ha ha!) radical-left British politician Tony Benn is a very interesting case in point. After many years of staying true to his radicalism no matter what the political and personal cost (which included routine demonising by the reactionary British press, and even within sections of his own political party), he is now a greatly respected ‘elder statesman’ of British public life, filling theatres and halls up and down a country which is positively yearning for honesty and authenticity in our spin-ridden political culture – an honesty which, to my mind, the admirable Tony Benn models impeccably. That’s the kind of ‘way of being’ I will always aspire to – and trust that any short-term cost that such aspirations entail will be more than outweighed by benefits (including, not least, a clear conscience!) in the longer term.
EJOP: Should therapy be a calling or a career choice?
Richard House: For me, therapy is always a ‘calling’ – yet I wouldn’t presume to say what it ‘should’ be for other people or practitioners; for that should be left to the free choice of every individual to make sense of, and pursue. But of course I have (strongly held) views about the effects that possessing different conceptions of therapy entails, both personally and culturally, and I will continue to put these observations and reflections out into the public sphere. And if those ideas have any effect on the wider direction in which therapy as a healing practice and a cultural phenomenon evolves, then so be it – but that’s my main motivation for doing so.
EJOP: You were trained initially in geography at Oxford and you developed later an interest for counseling/therapy. It was a rather interesting career switch. How did you end up developing your own therapy techniques?
Richard House: The only link between Geography and therapy that I am aware of is that the latter helped me to realise that the former (studying geography at university) had been very much of a false start as far as finding my true destiny is concerned.
I don’t recognise or support the language of ‘technique’ as far as therapy practice is concerned (as I’ve made clear at various points in my published writings). Rather, I adhere to the existential-phenomenological view that it is the way of being that is crucial in therapy practice, and it’s that sensibility that I take into all my work, which I see as a (hopefully progressive) deepening of my understanding of the dynamics and the mysteries of the human psyche and human relationship. Then, in the process, therapy just happens – as my former and inspirational trainer Tony Storey used to say. My task as a therapist, then, is to create the conditions within every unique therapy relationship in which therapy can happen – and that is all I do, or claim to do. And if I get it reasonably ‘right’ at least some of the time, then I’m being an effective therapist for the other (as Levinas would say).
EJOP: Do you have any advice for young therapists who are struggling to enter the profession?
Richard House: In terms of the motivation to become a therapist, I’d first want to ask any aspiring therapist whether they like people (including themselves); and whether they think they will be able to strike a good-enough balance between the life of a committed therapist and all that goes with it, and the needs they have for living a fulfilling personal life. If the answer to either of these questions were to be ‘no’, then I would urge them to think again before investing all of the emotional and financial resources required for becoming a professional therapist. And I would also urge any aspiring therapist to explore as openly and undefendedly as possible their motivations for becoming a therapist – including their unconscious ones! (Sussman’s soberingly excellent book A Curious Calling is a very good place to start here).
Once having decided to be a therapist, I would say that the most important thing by far is to stay true to yourself (which of course entails a radical openness to self-experience and a mature and maturing self-awareness). This for me includes holding the position of an ongoing willingness to challenge and deconstruct the most hallowed taken-for-granted assumptions of professional(ised) therapy – for in that way, I think you will maximise the possibility that your practice will evolve in a healthy direction rather than becoming ossified and frozen in professionalised institutional dogma. The Norwich psychotherapist Jill Hall once told me that she never, or hardly ever, advertised for clients – for if you are a good and effective therapist, then you will simply get clients, registered or not (with word of mouth and personal recommendation always, to my mind, being more effective than the glossiest and most impressive looking of brochures!). This approach really does require a great deal of trust and courage – and an openness to the possibility that if, indeed, clients don’t find their way to you, then maybe being a therapist just isn’t your destiny. Certainly, I think it’s possible to try too hard to be a therapist… – and if you catch yourself trying too hard, and then maybe trying something else would be a better idea.
Finally, they could try reading Jean Clark’s excellent edited book Freelance Counselling and Psychotherapy: Competition and Collusion (Routledge, 2002) and Guy Gladstone’s chapter ‘The making of a therapist and the corruption of the training market’, in the Implausible Professions anthology.
EJOP: Are there any common misperceptions about the therapist job that you would like to mention?
Richard House: If there are any, then I think they will have mostly been implicit and discernible in what I’ve already written, above. What immediately comes to mind is, first, the view that practising therapy is necessarily extremely demanding in an emotional or spiritual sense. For some practitioners, no doubt it is, but equally, I have people who just seem to be ‘naturals’ – or in other words, perhaps one might say (somewhat controversially!) that therapists and healers are far more ‘born’ than ‘made’. The other thing I would want to say is that for most people, it might be that having a non-therapist component to one’s working life or career is important, or even crucial. I have long felt that being a full-time therapist can have very peculiar (and far from healthy) effects on one’s psyche and distorting effects on one’s personal life and relationships, and in all kinds of ways – which effects I see as being an artifact of the highly peculiar way and setting in which therapist and client meet. This is something I’d like to write about at length, if I can ever find the space and time to do so!
EJOP: We know Rudolf Steiner greatly influenced your work. What mostly fascinates you about Steiner’s philosophy?
Richard House: To put the record straight, Rudolf Steiner’s influence has only come quite recently – from about 1998 onwards… – at least as far as I am aware!… What most fascinates me is the sheer, scarcely believable ‘life output’ of this extraordinary human being. Indeed, in the History of Ideas, one of the most abiding mysteries of the twentieth century is just how one of its most inspired, original and wide-ranging thinkers and seers – Steiner – is so comparatively little recognised, or even known of, in the range of disparate fields on which he has had, and continues to have, such a profound influence. The deliverer of over 6,000 lectures in his lifetime, his full collected works come to a staggering 350 volumes (Freud’s number about 40); and his lasting legacy includes uniquely innovative ‘impulses’ in fields as wide-ranging as curative education and social therapy (the world-renowned Camphill Communities); biodynamic agriculture (precursor of organic agriculture); holistic (anthroposophical) medicine; architecture and design; the arts (Eurythmy, painting, speech and drama); organisational consultancy; ethical banking and finance – and, of course, Steiner (Waldorf) education.
The extraordinary neglect of his vast corpus has been attributed by some to his quite unashamed esotericism and explicit engagement with ‘the divine’ through his discipline of ‘spiritual science’, which perhaps led – both in his own lifetime and since – to his shunning by conventional academia. (In his early, ‘pre-esoteric’ career, incidentally, Steiner was a widely respected philosopher and scientist.) More likely, I think, is that his thorough-goingly and then quite unfashionable holistic approach to human experience was quite simply decades ahead of its time; and it is only now, when so-called ‘new paradigm’, post-modern epistemologies and cosmologies are thankfully beginning to undermine the Zeitgeist of modernity, that his remarkable insights, which both incorporate yet also transcend modernity, are beginning to attract the rich attention they deserve. Certainly, Steiner was a relentless scourge of the one-sided materialism that prevailed in his day, and he brought a spiritually informed perspective to his educational worldview, which viewed the human being as far more than a material body. In this sense, his work has profound relevance to what we call ‘transpersonal therapy’ – but that is another story.
EJOP: Albert Ellis once said that the future of psychotherapy and psychology is in the school system. Do you agree with this?
Richard House: In a sense, yes – the ‘sense’ I am referring to being the very reason I became increasingly disillusioned with therapy in the mid-1990s, and in the process discovering Steiner education as an intrinsically healing experience for children. In other words, perhaps an urgent evolutionary task is for humankind to create cultural forms which help children to have healthy, empowering childhoods, thereby short-circuiting the need for remedial adult psychotherapy and counselling; and in this regard, surely education is the place to start – and especially as modern schooling systems are commonly moving in exactly the wrong direction!
However, there is an important note of caution I want to make here. The current fashion of ‘professionalising’ children’s difficulties can so easily miss the point. My own strong conviction, rather, is that it is a far better use of our creative energies to strive for the creation of natural schooling environments which are, by their very nature, intrinsically healing – rather than seeing ‘Child Psychotherapy’, ‘School Counselling’ and the like as yet another professional opportunity or ‘career niche’ for ‘Professionalised Therapy’ to colonise within modern culture.
Rudolf Steiner himself emphasised the healing aspect of any genuinely authentic educational experience, illustrating how imaginative knowledge based on truth is intrinsically healing and health-giving. As he said exactly 80 years ago now, ‘Our whole Waldorf School pedagogy has a Therapeutic character.’ Critics of the soulless utilitarianism of modern mainstream schooling systems (myself included) have repeatedly stressed the untold, long-term emotional and developmental damage that the fashionable ‘surveillance culture’ is perpetrating on today’s children, with its anxiety-saturated obsession with assessment and testing, and its forced cognitive early learning at absurdly young, developmentally inappropriate ages. Perhaps those of us whose practice and world-view are still informed by spiritual sensibility and child-centredness could profitably commit at least as much time and energy to the political task of challenging the cultural/political sources of the current malaise – in which ‘child abuse’ in routinely committed against children by and through modern technocratic culture – as we do to ‘therapising’ childhood problems once they have been created. Put differently, I would like to see a plethora of child healing practices flourishing and weaving themselves into the very fabric of modern culture, rather than witness the sad spectacle of an ascendant, professionalised ‘Child Therapy’ mechanistically bolting itself on to the fields of education and health care.
EJOP: Are there any other editorial projects you would like to initiate in the future?
Richard House: One that is currently ‘in process’ is a book on the relevance of Rudolf Steiner’s work to therapy and counselling. Another might be the crossover between therapy and education, responding to the recent critiques of the infiltration of therapy sensibilities into the education world by Kathryn Ecclestone of Exeter University and her colleagues. And I am continually surprised by the directions that unfold in my life, and I look forward to more such (editorial) surprises in the future!
Thank you very much for giving me then opportunity to answer your interesting questions – and I hope that my answers and musings will be of interest and stimulation to your readers.
Richard House, Norwich UK, 3rd November 2005