Difference

Bernardine Bishop, the great-granddaughter of the poet Alice Meynell, was one of the witnesses from the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. After writing two early novels, she taught in a London comprehensive school for ten years and then went on to have a distinguished career as a psychotherapist, during which time she was a member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and of the Lincoln Centre for Psychotherapy. Cancer forced her retirement in 2010 and thereafter she returned to her first love, fiction. Adrian Dickinson is a Full Member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy, having qualified in 1990, and has a private practice in London. Angela Foster had a career in social work and higher education before training as a psychotherapist. She has a private practice and is a partner in Foster Roberts Cardona, which provides organizational consultancy and professional development services. She teaches at the Tavistock Clinic and has published widely in the field of mental health. Josephine Klein was an academic for the first twenty years of her professional life and then a psychotherapist in private practice, now retired. She is a Fellow of the London Centre for Psychotherapy and was until recently a member of the British Association of Psychotherapists.

'Negotiating difference, in gender and generation, has been a cornerstone of psychoanalytic thinking. This important and courageous new book opens up a timely exploration of other differences that pop up in the consulting room around race, immigration status, criminality, financial status, pregnancy, illness, disability, aging and death etc. without reducing them to the more familiar. It is clinically detailed, which allows a point of entry into specific debates about how to understand and negotiate these differences in the service of the therapeutic task. More general issues facing our profession in an increasingly diverse and changing world are addressed equally boldly. It deserves to be read by student and experienced practitioner alike.' - M. Fakhry Davids, Member, Institute of Psychoanalysis, London

• The London Centre for Psychotherapy -- Introduction -- Living and working with difference and diversity -- A different kind of psychotherapy -- Racism as a borderline issue: the avoidance and marginalization of race in psychotherapy -- Predicaments in practice -- The pregnant therapist -- The crouching monk: disability in the consulting room -- Paying for love in the helping professions: contradictions inherent in charging fees for psychotherapy -- Supervision in a forensic unit: how recycled trauma shapes the container in team supervision 1