Richard House - Böcker

A key theme of this book is that we urgently need a therapeutic ethos in order to bring both educational and therapeutic sensibilities to bear on the issue of children's wellbeing, if truly effective and appropriate policy responses to the current malaise are to be fashioned. Not least, we must pay particular attention to childhood experience, show

This book draws together radical critiques of therapy and shows how therapists have become too willing administrators of the mind, and how they then delight in the bureaucratic management of therapeutic practice.

In Beyond Mainstream Medicine, Thomas Hardtmuth, M.D. and Richard House, Ph.D. dive deeply into the very foundations of human well-being, exhaustively detailing what is wrong philosophically and clinically with the current prevailing biomedical paradigm of health and disease; how these shortcomings have been highlighted in the course of the Covid crisis; and what changes need to occur for the radical re-founding of a genuinely holistic understanding of health, illness and healing to occur.

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.Shortlisted for the South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2014.Book of the Year in the Guardian, Spectator, Independent and Daily Mail.The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy.It starts with an explosion, a man on the run and the theft of over fifty million dollars. It moves from the Middle East to the Mediterranean, around mainland Europe via the sleazy underworld of Naples, and across America. It ends in a locked room.Brilliantly original, playful and ambitious, The Kills is a terrifying, awe-inspiring, mind-blowing sensation.Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.‘A damn good book’ The Sunday Times‘A staggering achievement’ Daily Mail‘A thrilling, overwhelming ride’ The Spectator

This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the present state and the future of Humanistic Psychology, showcasing a rich international contributor line-up.The book addresses head-on the current state of a world in crisis, not only placing the current conjuncture within a wider evolutionary context, but also demonstrating the specifically humanistic-psychological values and practices that can help us to transform and transcend the world’s current challenges. Each chapter looks in depth at a variety of issues: counselling and psychotherapy, creativity and the humanities, post-traumatic stress, and socio-political movements and activism.The book amply confirms that Humanistic Psychology is as alive, and as innovative and exciting, as it ever has been, and has tremendous relevance to the uncertainties that characterize the unprecedented individual and global challenges of the times. It celebrates the diverse and continuing significance of Humanistic Psychology by providing a robust and reliable roadmap for a new generation of counsellors and psychotherapists. In these richly diverse chapters will be found inspiration, pockets of resistance, mature critical reflexivity and much much more - a book accurately reflecting our present situation, and which is an invaluable addition to the psychology literature.

This book provides a thought-provoking examination of the present state and the future of Humanistic Psychology, showcasing a rich international contributor line-up.The book addresses head-on the current state of a world in crisis, not only placing the current conjuncture within a wider evolutionary context, but also demonstrating the specifically humanistic-psychological values and practices that can help us to transform and transcend the world’s current challenges. Each chapter looks in depth at a variety of issues: counselling and psychotherapy, creativity and the humanities, post-traumatic stress, and socio-political movements and activism.The book amply confirms that Humanistic Psychology is as alive, and as innovative and exciting, as it ever has been, and has tremendous relevance to the uncertainties that characterize the unprecedented individual and global challenges of the times. It celebrates the diverse and continuing significance of Humanistic Psychology by providing a robust and reliable roadmap for a new generation of counsellors and psychotherapists. In these richly diverse chapters will be found inspiration, pockets of resistance, mature critical reflexivity and much much more - a book accurately reflecting our present situation, and which is an invaluable addition to the psychology literature.

Dishonest Days is a thrilling, continent-sweeping novel of conspiracy and revenge from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of The Kills.1986, the Laos–Cambodia border. Fourteen women drown in an accident, all of them participants in a drug trial for Panzet Pharmaceuticals. Scattered between their bodies, boxes of Aspinex DP1024, the unstable and highly addictive variant of a painkiller sold by Panzet. Their deaths are covered up, along with the drug’s harmful side effects.Cuna, Colombia. West Core, an American mining company, funds the worst excesses of the Colombian civil war, laundering money for the cartels. The company forces thirty-five miners to smuggle a cache of emeralds into the United States: their backs are cut open, the jewels inserted into the flesh, and stitched closed.Edgerton, Wyoming. Peter Norstrom, an employee of West Core, dies of an AIDS-related illness after his employers cut his health insurance in a petty act of revenge. His lover Tom Gellert, researching the impact of long-term exposure to hazardous chemicals at a West Core mine, seeks retribution against the company with an act of domestic terrorism which will trigger a decades-long guerrilla protest movement.At the heart of all this sit Richard and Patsy Wildemann, the owners of Panzet, West Core and more companies besides, reclusive billionaires who profit from war and disease while laundering their reputations through art and philanthropy.Stretching from the recent past into the near future, Dishonest Days is an epic thriller that examines the decisions made by people caught up in the waves of history, and what it means to atone for one’s mistakes. It is a novel about blood and emeralds, security and power, perfect for readers of Don DeLillo, Roberto Bolaño and Thomas Pynchon.‘House’s writing is spare and compelling’ The Guardian‘A writer at the top of his game’ Los Angeles Times‘With a single observation he can give lasting resonance to a few seconds of human awkwardness. House gives us vivid pictures: powerful, bleak, beautiful’ The Times Literary Supplement

A key theme of this book is that we urgently need a therapeutic ethos in order to bring both educational and therapeutic sensibilities to bear on the issue of children's wellbeing, if truly effective and appropriate policy responses to the current malaise are to be fashioned. Not least, we must pay particular attention to childhood experience, showing that scientific and technical developments are always secondary to the resources of the human soul, if we are to minimize the extent to which today's children will need therapy as adults. This will entail moving beyond narrowly mechanistic definitions of, and ways of thinking about, "well-being" and the psychological therapies. This book offers pointers to the kinds of arguments that can inform what is rapidly becoming a central concern of politicians and policy-makers.A unique book in the field, Childhood, Well-being and a Therapeutic Ethos will be core cross-disciplinary reading in a range of academic and training contexts, including within Education, Psychology and Sociology departments, on early childhood studies and policy studies modules and degrees, and on child and other psychotherapy and counselling trainings.

This radical and provocative book challenges the very foundations of therapy itself. In examining the hidden assumptions of therapy, the author poses the question 'Is therapy more concerned with preserving its own hegemony than with an honest authenticity of procedure and practice?'

In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" challenges the foundations of many of therapy's most take-for-granted and self-serving assumptions. Yet despite its title, it is very far from being yet another anti-therapy book. Rather, the book's central aim is to retrieve what is best in therapy work from what Richard House sees as the pernicious and ultimately deadening forces of institutional professionalisation; credentialism and careerism; 'audit-culture' obsessions with 'evidence-based practice'; and the 'apolitical' psychopathologising of clients - concerns well captured by the term 'the ideology of modernity'. In, "Against and Beyond Therapy" assembles some 15 years of updated critical writings within the broad therapy field, with incisively provocative commentaries on the professionalisation process, the client voice, therapeutic education and training, and research. For practitioners who are highly sceptical about the beneficence of the state regulation of the psychological therapies, this book promises to be a rallying-point for the development of a 'post-professional' therapy culture.It will be indispensable reading for critical psychologists, and for therapists of all persuasions and modalities who value critical thinking and challenge, and who welcome the opportunity to step outside of therapy's conventional, taken-for-granted 'regimes of truth'.

The first edition of Implausible Professions, published in 1997, foretold many of the core issues around therapy 'professionalisation' that have come to dominate the field in recent years as the shadow of possible state regulation has loomed ever larger over the psy landscape. In the current highly charged context, this new edition could not be better timed. The many and diverse chapters, written by a mix of well-known names and new arrivals, are as fresh and relevant today as they were in the 1990s. The back cover of the first edition described how the contributors to Implausible Professions 'throw into question many of the most taken-for-granted assumptions on which the professionalisationA" and commodification of psychotherapy and counselling are based. The essays display the creative pluralism and passionate vitality which typify the best aspects of therapeutic work.' This edition contains a completely new editorial Introduction and Conclusion, updating the story to 2011.For those engaging with the politics of professionalisation for the first time, or wanting to refresh themselves about the reasons why counselling and psychotherapy are in principle 'implausible professions', this text is even more indispensable than it was in 1997.

This new edition of a prescient masterpiece was very ahead of its time when first published over 30 years ago, and is even more urgently relevant today, exploring how to get beyond the wheel of victimhood to claim our full adulthood in freedom.Why is it that a sense of freedom and well-being is not a more natural human state? Perhaps we are still hampered by an outdated ‘Newtonian Psychology’ which underpins the belief that something or somebody caused us to be the way we are. Once trapped in an endless chain of blaming, woundedness and guilt, victimhood prevails and adulthood then eludes us.Along with our species’ physical maturity, there must surely be vital aspects of the human psyche which most of us have not, as yet, brought into play. In relinquishing our present framework of thought, and opening to a more extended experience of self, spirit and ego could then be reconciled, with freedom and responsibility becoming an achievable reality. Yet letting go is precisely what we fear most. This book is an exploration of why this should be so – and an invitation to embrace our full adulthood.“It is a real thrill to find the spiritual aspect of holism expressed with such vision and authority” Sir George Trevelyan