Existential Analysis 16.

1: January 2005

Responsibility and Ethico-moral Values

in Counselling and Psychotherapy

Erik Abrams and Del Loewenthal

Abstract
This paper reviews notions of responsibility relating to the provision of
counselling and psychotherapy. The British Association for Counselling
and Psychotherapy Ethical Framework for Good Practice in Counselling
and Psychotherapy (2002) speaks of ethics that should consider ‘values’,
‘principles’ and ‘personal qualities’, and that ‘principles direct attention to
important ethical responsibilities’; but in what way are these constituted as
a responsibility in the therapeutic encounter, and how or why are they
framed as ethics or morality? It is argued that responsibility infers an
‘other’ to whom one is responsible. In so far as responsibility is a
formulation of value, it is circumscribed by considerations of ethics,
morality and power, all of which can impinge on the therapeutic encounter.
It is therefore important to trace the development of these elements as we
practice them in the therapeutic encounter.

Introduction
What is responsibility? It is a strange notion and a relatively new way of
speaking in English, developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. It derives
from an older word ‘responsiveness’, as a quality of participation in
dialogue (Oxford English Dictionary 2000, 742).
Responsibility is ‘relatively late-born in the family of words in which
duty, law, virtue, goodness and morality (post-modernism would also
include power relations) are its much older siblings’ (Niebuhr 1963, 47-8);
it posits ‘the continuity of a self with a relatively consistent scheme of
interpretation of what it is reacting to …[and] a continuity of agents to
which response is being made’ (Niebuhr 1963, 65). This definition
highlights the dilemma of responsibility in that it ranges from the
relationship between two people, to a broad sweep of social
‘universalities’; a range of relationships that encompasses both micro and
macro-interactions. There is also an inference that there is a coherent ‘I’
relating to an ‘o/Other’ on the basis of ‘consistency of values’.
Herein lies a further difficulty, as the assumption of a coherent ‘I’ and
‘o/Other’ is open to discussion in both philosophical and therapeutic terms.
On closer examination, a fragmentation sets in that at worst may mean that
we are not responsible, and at best that we do not know what that
responsibility is. At root is the nature of our being and how we relate,
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going back to Socrates’ perennial question: ‘How should one live?’

(Williams 1993, 1-21). Different representations of Being have provided
different notions of this, and if there are truths to be discovered, they are
disputed truths: ‘The dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our
pursuit of truth, we must answer only to our fellow human beings, or also
to something non-human, such as the way things really are in themselves’
Rorty (2001).
One axis for this debate is between sensibility (the senses, feelings)
versus reason (thought, logic, rationality); another is between the ‘means to
an end’ (utilitarian) versus the ‘end in-itself’ (moral imperative) versions of
responsibility. Implied in these considerations are two further axes of
debate; who (or what) is to be trusted/mistrusted with responsibility – that
is to say, who is responsible for defining responsibility? Additionally, is
responsibility an individual ‘in the moment’ issue or a collectively imposed
rule?
Aristotle emphasised reason (as opposed to emotion and sensibility) as
the arbiter of ethics, on the basis that it is reason that differentiates man
from animals. This was later reinforced by Cartesian body-mind dualism
and Kantian ethics. Reason thus becomes the ‘seat’ of ethical
consideration.
In utilitarian or moral terms, responsibility was argued on the basis of
the common good, be it as Aristotles’ Polity or Hume and Bentham’s
‘common weal’; but then, who possessed sufficient reason to delineate
responsibility and in what measure? Thus for Hobbes, man’s nature was
base, with self-interest often working contrary to reason and the common
good. An element of shepherding was therefore necessary, to be provided
by the state or a governing body, a Leviathan.

Post-Modern Perspectives
These axes of debate are polarities within what in post-modern terms may
be regarded as privileging a dominant (or superior) against a recessive
(inferior) discourse. However, it is worth being mindful of the view taken
by Angus (2000, 187) that ‘the search that looks for meaning in (or
through) the human sciences has experienced a historical disruption of
community such that it seeks to establish community on the ground of
knowledge and/or ethics’.
This puts into question the Human or Enlightenment Project (the rational
deductive scientific enterprise) as it simply disrupts community and then
tries to restore it through knowledge and ethics: ‘There is a splitting within
the human subject into knower and known …Humanity is doubled’ as
Nietzsche and subsequently Foucault put it, and the project of our-self-
knowing is suspended in this double. Understanding humanity [also]
requires understanding of the social condition – the intersubjective

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meaning of human life. This is another double… the self and the other … a
question of knowledge but also of the foundation of ethical community’
(Angus 2000, 186-7). Ethics and morality are seen here as a stratum of the
drive to knowledge conceived as a Logocentric system of culture (Fiumara,
1990).
In post-modern terms these reflections are metaphysical meta-narratives:
‘an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into
which everything can fit, independent of one’s time and place (Rorty,
1995)’. They are open to deconstruction.
We are faced with Levinas’ opening comment in ‘Totality and
Infinity’(1969, 21): ‘Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest
importance to know whether we are duped by morality’. We will consider
later, what Levinas may have meant by this comment.
As Williams (1993, 197-8) comments: ‘These various versions of moral
philosophy share a false image of how reflection is related to practice, an
image of theories in terms of which they uselessly elaborate their
differences from one another’. In an earlier chapter titled ‘The Linguistic
Turn’, Williams discusses the uses of language and the way we use
language in arriving at philosophical conclusions. The question raised is: to
what extent can a philosophical conclusion, a ‘value’, be made into an
‘ought’? This process mirrors the empiricist/reductionist scientific process
that extracts a ‘fact’ from an ‘is’. However, a value (an ought) differs from
a fact (an is) as between a prescriptive and descriptive form of philosophy.
Do we, then, use language objectively to discover philosophical truths
(reformulating both as and when necessary), or is it the language that pre-
empts the form and content of the search we undertake? In essence, do we
speak language, or does language speak us?
There are several directions this answer can take (see Rorty 1967, 33-9),
but the least common denominator of these positions is ‘philosophy as
proposal, versus philosophy as discovery’ Williams (1993, 120-31). This
applies equally to therapy and counselling where the common denominator
position would then be ‘counselling/therapy as proposal versus
counselling/therapy as discovery’.
Rorty (1980, xi and 12) comes to the conclusion that a philosophical
problem is a product of unconscious assumptions built into the vocabulary
in which the problem is stated. It is pictures, rather than propositions,
metaphors rather than statements, which determine our philosophical
convictions.
What becomes of responsibility in this strange landscape?

Post-Modern considerations of Value and Responsibility

If we can accept the assumption that a linguistic dimension predetermines
us to make a ‘problem’ of philosophy and value, perhaps Saussure’s efforts

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in language analysis might demonstrate what is inferred here in regard to

responsibility - that the way that language is framed also frames the
thinking about responsibility and the values that develop from it.
One line of Saussure’s work led to the making of a science of linguistics,
with notions of signifier/signified and referent that mirror the
subject/object division of scientific study. We will consider the implication
of this on moral and ethical value shortly. The other direction would be
Saussure’s investigation of ‘Anagrams’ or poems – about 100 notebooks of
analysis of ancient poetic verse, unpublished and undiscovered till the
1970s. These evidenced Saussure’s effort at discovering hidden patterns
and formulas underlying a surface text of ancient verse. This effort was
ultimately abandoned, not because of an insufficiency of evidence and
interpretation, but because of an excess of it. While the poems, as a
creative process stood outside the true/false arguments of science, the
abundance of ‘results’ from the analysis of the anagram’s structure
constituted a contradiction in terms – how could they all be right?
Perhaps the results were due to a deformation of the poetic process by a
sense-making, structuring, exercise, such that the entire notion of sense is
called into question by the propensity to discover patterns that we then call
meaningful (Ramsay, 2002).
To return to our theme of responsibility, and of moral and ethical values,
is the experience of responsibility constituted as a philosophical, structured
value, or is it a poetic moment whose analysis creates a structure that is
always a deformation? Are these not the quandaries we face in therapy? Is
it possible that the term ‘value’, as constituted in economic, linguistic, or
derivative philosophic terms is suspect? If the concept of value is flawed in
one of these disciplines, is it flawed in all?
‘Baudrillard (2001) [1972] compared the formulae of economic and
linguistic/symbolic values only to find them to be both equivalent and
exchangeable with each other.
Thus:
Exchange Value /Commodity: Utility of Commodity
Use Value
was equivalent and exchangeable with
Signifier/Referent: Utility of the Sign/Symbol
Signified
Classically, the numerator in the equations is a structural component that
is self- referring in relation to other signifiers or items of exchange (e.g. as
units of money are self-referring). The denominator in the equations is a
functional component that refers to a tangible object of utility: a product

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with a use value (what the money can buy), or a signified object that has a
reality that is ‘out there’.
Baudrillard, however, dismantles the separation between numerator and
denominator as falsely structured divisions, and concludes that both sides
of the divide say the same thing in what is effectively a circular argument.
For example, if we consider the economic equations, it may be said that
what creates an ‘Exchange Value’ of goods is productive labour. Similarly,
what creates ‘Use Value’ is individual/social need; but this formulation
merely disguise a re-iteration of the subject/object dichotomy from two
different ends of an equation that ends up saying the same thing
(Baudrillard 2001 [1972], 66-8).
Thus ‘Exchange Value’ that is created by ‘Productive Labour’ is a case
of ‘Subject’ producing ‘Object’ and distils into a ‘Subject/Object’
dichotomy.
Similarly, but from the other end ‘Use Value’ is defined by ‘Social
Need’ as ‘Object’ needed by ‘Subject’ and distils into an Object/Subject
dichotomy.
Baudrillard concludes that ‘there is no reality or principle of reality other
than that directly produced by the system as its ideal reference’ (p.73). We
merely create signs validated by other signs where ‘all ambivalence is
reduced by equivalence’. There is no longer a rational/deductive scientific
endeavour, but one of sign, code and simulation – what Baudrillard calls
‘the political economy of the sign’. Use Value is, furthermore, ‘the
expression of a whole metaphysic: that of utility. It registers itself as a kind
of moral law at the heart of the object. …‘Isn’t this what all human ethics
is based on: the ‘proper use’ of oneself? Thus our moral exchange (Kantian
or Christian) is anchored to a final relation to a transcendent reality or a
god: ‘a providential code that watches over the correlation of the object
with the need of the subject under the rubric of functionality - …subject
with divine law under the sign of morality (pp. 70-1).
These deliberations lead to a grim conclusion regarding an ethical-moral
dimension of responsibility (as they do for the activity of psychoanalysis,
and perhaps too for therapy). Each new system of value grafts to itself a
previous phantom value set, and extends a resurrected version of the real in
a new form: from dialectics, use value, production, to the unconscious and
liberation of repressed meaning (‘At the exact point where its psychic
principle of reality is confused with its psychoanalytic reality principle, the
unconscious becomes, like political economy, another simulation model’
(Baudrillard 2001 [1976], 125).
Is it then our attempt to ‘close ambivalence with equivalence’ that
prompts our drive to create codes of moral conduct and responsibility?
Additionally, is it perhaps the cycle of foreclosure by ever-new cycles of
the utility model that obliges moral arguments to ‘uselessly elaborate their
differences from one another’ (see Williams, above)? Baudrillard’s
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analysis would indicate that a structure/function model is as untenable for

responsibility as it is for language – its purpose is to drive a system of
utility in relation to language, economics, politics and the individual, that
favours an equivalence rather than ambivalence in those entities. In the
process, the values that underpin responsibility (defined by a context and a
meaning) are also dismantled.
Is our version of responsibility another version of Saussure’s linguistic
theory, such that we with it, become just another episode of the anagram
adventure - a chain of signifiers that are self-referential? Is there then a
‘responsibility’ beyond the anagrammatic, and can we go beyond a chain
of signifiers such as ‘Boundaries’ (in or out?), Time (clock or reverie?),
‘Rights’ (duties?), ‘Charter’ (service?), and if so, what would be the
language for it? A variety of post-modern writers have considered the
meaning of such responsibility, but the words used in relation to it are
somewhat strange: rupture, revelation, trace, desire, seduction, ghosts, the
messianic, and poetry. These are words used to describe a relationship that
is ever-beyond the fixity of ‘knowledge-based’ philosophical values, be
they ethical, scientific or economic.

Responsibility in a Post-modern Landscape

For Heidegger (perhaps better described as an existential philosopher), it is
a journey of poetry as philosophy (Heidegger, 1971). A Heraclitean
dynamic of ‘presencing and concealment’ is suggested: ‘Self-revealing not
only never dispenses with concealing but actually needs it, in order to
occur …as dis-closing’. There is no closure to the nature of being, and
there is uncertainty in its presentation from concealment (Heidegger1975,
102-23). Does this not challenge grand notions of value and reality? In
case this is regarded as merely poetic licence, others express a similar
aporia.
In reference to what ‘we call the history of ideas… thought… science…
knowledge’, Foucault declares that ‘one is led [ ] through the naivety of
chronologies, towards an ever receding point that is never itself present in
any history; this point is merely its own void’ (Foucault, 1972, 21-5). The
inference for counselling and therapy is that there is no ‘audit-trail’ of
history (neither for us nor the client) that allows us to endorse our role with
an ethical or technical-scientific knowledge.
What then of ethics and responsibility? Foucault’s argument would
replace historic meta-narrative by discourses: ‘Discourse must not be
referred to the distant presence of origin, but treated as and when it
occurs… a task… of treating discourses… as practices that systematically
form the objects of which they speak ((Foucault 1972, pp. 25 and 49)’.
This implies a creative, communicative, in the moment process. It also
implies that there are no ‘solutions’. Quoting Foucault (in Kritzman 1988,

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284): ‘Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the

considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection’.
Cooper and Blair comment:
Foucault was clearly envisioning an ethic that maximises freedom by
always subjecting the taken for granted to questions and creative
adaptation – remaining open to new understandings and forms of
relationship. Such an ethical account certainly departs from a
tradition in which ethical principles are seen as universally applicable
and serve as broad standards for judging ideas and actions.
Cooper and Blair (2002)
In radical contrast to Foucault’s ontological freedom and ethics, Levinas
(in Totality and Infinity, 1969) takes the view that ethics precedes
ontology, is pre-ontological, and rather than being a freedom, imposes a
responsibility for the Other that is never fulfilled. For Levinas ‘placing the
Other in context of my knowledge or intentionality effectively makes them
a possession of my knowledge; a ‘totalising’ and objectifying gesture that
essentially forecloses their infinitude’. A meeting with the Other is
revelatory – beyond understanding, and in that sense also pre-ontological.
It is a meeting with the infinite, the alterity of the wholly Other that
demands a response from beyond my self-centredness: ‘a summons to
answer… in its very position wholly a responsibility’.
This ‘face the face’ experience where my freedom is called into question
Levinas calls ‘conscience’: ‘In conscience I have an experience that is not
commensurate with any a priori framework – a conceptless experience. It
is thus that… we defined desire.’ (Levinas 1969, 100-1). As Levin (1998)
points out, the ‘primordial’ element in Levinas’ (and Merleau-Ponty’s)
conceptions of the ethical, is referred to as ‘trace’, and describes the
indescribability of our encounter with others.
Firstly in the sense of a pre-personal dimension of perception: ‘I …find
at work in my organs of perception a thought older than myself of which
those organs are merely a trace’ (Merleau-Ponty in Levin, 1998). Secondly
in the sense of a paradoxical temporality of the face to face encounter;
Levin concludes:
The traces of a moral assignment inscribed in the flesh constitute,
prior to the recognition of the moral law, a certain modal disposition
or attunement; but these traces are indeed virtually nothing – unless
we make something of them. Our ‘moral sources’ are thus before us –
but only, it would seem, as the realization of a forever deferred future.
(Levin, 1998).
The term ‘deferred future’ here resonates with Derrida’s use of the term
‘differance’ as a suspension of meaning in language. The equivalent of

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trace, for Derrida, would presumably be the ‘spectre’, a ‘hauntology’ (a

word-play on ontology):
For the spell of hauntologie always already, will have been haunting
ontology. This spell is the spirit of the Other and we should learn to
live by learning …how to talk with [these ghosts] …they are always
there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer,
even if they are not yet. Attending to these ghosts, allowing ourselves
to be haunted by spectres ‘entails responsibility
(from Spectres of Marx by Derrida (1994), quoted in Powell 1996,
141 and 146).
Derrida’s notions of responsibility are explored in Reynolds (2001)
using as core text Derrida’s ‘Gift of Death’ (1995). This is based on the
biblical story of Abraham and Isaac at Mount Moriah and raises, as
irresolvable, the dilemma between the responsibility to the alterity of the
‘wholly other’ (a ‘radical singularity’), and responsibility to the other (and
other others) that accords with general principles [that are] in the public
domain. For Derrida, a decision if it is to be genuinely a decision, must
create a rupture with all prior preparations or anticipations for that decision
– ‘the land of Moriah is our habitat every second of every day’. He likens
this state to the messianic, without the comfort of messianism. By the latter
he means a religion that proffers known characteristics to the Messiah (an
objectivisation perhaps?). The messianic is more in the manner of a
‘relationless relation’, a waiting-on and a waiting-for the yet to come. Akin
to his hauntology, the messianic is always a state of ‘yet to come’, and it is
in that state that our responsibility resides.
In this discussion of responsibility, we are faced with responsibility as
both revelation and concealment, a responsibility that is never dis-closed. It
is a responsibility that precedes a framework, is ghostlike, haunts us in an
a-temporal messianic dimension, and is insubstantial. Ethics and morality
become primordial, even pre-ontological. Furthermore, if we wish to revert
to some basis of constructed ethical or moral value to inform our
responsibility, it is subverted through its own frame of definition as a
construct.
How do counselling and psychotherapy address the various notions of
responsibility discussed above?

The view from within Counselling and Psychotherapy

Bond (1993, pp33, 34) regards the BAC(P)’s Ethical framework as being
informed by four elements: Moral Philosophy, Law, Resources (What is
possible?), and Practitioners (What do we want to do?). The moral
principles that Bond mentions as ‘proven useful’ are: Beneficence (greatest
good), non-maleficence (least harm), justice (fairest), respect for autonomy

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(maximizing opportunity for choice). Bond also notes that while the
‘BAC(P) has made enormous progress and has acted as a national forum
for establishing standards of practice… there has been no significant
interest from moral philosophers in these endeavours.’
He cites three possible reasons for this reticence:
- A need for the counsellor role to be more clearly defined to allow
consideration of the issues.
- Rapid growth of counselling has meant that pragmatic decision-
making has run ahead of moral philosophy.
- The origins of counselling may be less sympathetic to moral argument
than scientific justification.
While Bond sees a rapid growth of counselling, Smail (in Fairbairn and
Fairbairn 1987, 31-43) sees ‘an explosion of psychotherapeutic and
counselling procedures of all kinds’ but that ‘there is no such thing as
psychotherapy’. He likens its ‘scientific’ base to technical rhetoric that has
more in common with magic. Even knowing the problem does not mean
one has the cure - an un-stated inference of therapy.
Smail regards the covertness of therapeutic delivery, saying one thing
but doing another, as a dangerous ethical dimension. Thus psychotherapy
covertly ‘fulfils a need for love, by making use of a tacit expectation of
cure (which in turn rests on a conscious but irrational faith in mechanism
and an unconscious belief in magic), and serves an ideological view of
human distress as arising out of the conduct and perceptions of the
individual… Therapy [provides] a commodity which is becoming scarce in
our society – that is love’.
The allusion to love as a commodity is interesting in view of what has
been said of ‘commodity’ and it’s roots in the economics of use and
productivity – are we to judge people’s responsibility by the same
benchmark of usefulness and productivity? The tenor of Smail’s argument
takes psychotherapy outside of its comfort zone of technique and client,
into areas of social politics and economics that cast it in a less favourable
light. The title of Rowe’s contribution in the same book (Fairbairn and
Fairbairn 1987, 231-43) describes this proclivity as: ‘Avoiding the big
issues and attending to the small’.
Is it possible that the practice of therapy is irresponsible, such that it
misrepresents the therapeutic encounter?
Pilgrim (in Dryden and Feltham (ed.), 1992, 225-43) maintains that
psychotherapy has become engrossed in political evasion, a reductionism
in the conception of the human condition, compounded by a self-interested
professionalisation of therapy. He sees these attributes in both
psychodynamic and humanistic therapies, with pseudo-medical/scientific
ideology translating into reductionism (the grand generalisations), and
associated technologies (how it’s done) providing professional status.

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Clarkson (2000, 23-6) states (as do other writers), that the weight of
evidence indicates that while the theoretical approach is not relevant to the
successful outcome of psychotherapy, the relationship is. However, this is
immediately followed by a list of conditions that have a scientific,
professional ring, but do not necessarily bear scrutiny. They attempt to
define but perhaps limit the indefinable in relationship, by the ‘knowing’ of
it.
Working alliance presumes, within the term alliance, intent and a
common end in mind.
Transferential/countertransferential relationship locates relationship in
psychoanalytic terms that are presumptive pseudo-scientific notions.

Reparative/developmentally needed relationship assumes relationships

develop in the axis of a linear timeline.
person-to-person and transpersonal relationship while subscribing to
certain notions of personhood within therapy, are nevertheless
platitudinous in conception.
Are these not a chain of floating signifiers that are self-defining and
recede to a non-existant point? From the post-modern perspectives
discussed above, these notions are flawed. Relationships are formed in the
speaking of them, as discourses rather than the story that historicises and
limits life to a linear time-line (Foucault). Notions of equivalence minimise
or discount ambivalence (Baudrillard), while alterity, as wholly other
(Levinas, Derrida), does not pre-empt or foreclose otherness by divisions
of body, mind and spirit as though we know what we are speaking of.
The issue for psychotherapy and counselling remains: are we agents of
socialisation, providing therapy for a moral or social ‘good’, with an aim of
betterment in which we place ourselves in a place of knowing? Is the
drafting of an ethical ‘check-list’ a drive towards professionalisation
(House, R., 1999), and is it potentially unethical in putting the profession/
system before the client (Loewenthal, 1996)? Are we promoting a skills-
base that is ultimately regulative, or are we called to responsibility in
revelatory relationship? If the latter, there are notions of desire, of
suffering and guilt attached to this responsibility for both therapist and
client (Todd, S., 2001). How does this equate with the self-betterment and
organismic growth of other therapies (Harrington, D., 1994)? Which of
these stances is ethical?
The indication would be that responsibility and ethics are matters for the
individual in the intimacy of Being (Williams, R.N. and Gantt, E., 1998),
and arise as personal self-evaluative but aporetic moments, rather
than socially imposed universal values (Bauman, Z., 1996, 4-15). As
Loewenthal (1996) comments, we place ourselves in an untenable position
when we know ‘the story’ or have the ‘grand’ narrative. In post-modern
terms notions of ‘self’-betterment, of ‘self’ defined as a unitary being, are a
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story - ‘a story among stories’ (Loewenthal, D., 1996., Loewenthal, D. and

R. Snell, 1999). We all live in relationship and are subject to, be it subject
to language, the unconscious, desire, the o/Other (related names would
perhaps be Lacan, Derrida, Levinas, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari).
As Kunz (1998, 31-5) has commented of psychology, but probably true
of counselling and psychotherapy as well, it is generally taught as an ego-
logy that puts the ‘I’ first, an egocentrism. In contrast, putting the o/Other
first is heteronomy, an alterocentrism. The difference in perspective
potentially goes to the very heart of psychotherapy as ethical practice. To
quote Gans:
Perhaps it is psychoanalysis (Psychotherapy? reviewer’s emphasis)
recognising itself at an impasse [ ] unable to either resolve or
suppress the Being question that could open a rapprochement with [ ]
a philosophy that has moved beyond the Being question toward ethics,
toward the acceptance of our infinite responsibility to and for the
other. And from the side of ethics, perhaps it is the context of the
clinical ritual with its limited temporal boundaries, that the
Levinasian exhortation of putting the other first becomes a practical
possibility, even a necessity.
Gans (1997)
It was Socrates who alluded to philosophical dialogue as being an act of
midwifery (Plato’s Theaetetus, in Fiumura 1990, 143-68). As therapists
should we then be, as Fiumura suggests, midwives to the birth of our
clients in speech and dialogue? But then, are we also Charon the ferryman,
at the crossing between life and death?
It is an uncomfortable question, but what is ethical about therapy and
analysis? Perhaps the enigma that is our responsibility lies in the laughter
of Being (Borch-Jacobsen, ed. Botting and Wilson, 1998, 146-66).

Dr Erik Abrams is a lecturer in the School of Psychology and Therapeutic

Studies at Roehampton University and a member of its Research Centre for
Therapeutic Education. His therapeutic practice is within the National
Probation Service, and has developed over seven years, from an initial
placement as a trainee therapist.
Dr Del Loewenthal is Professor of Psychotherapy and Counselling and
Director of the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, School of
Psychology and Therapeutic Studies, Roehampton University. He is an
existential-analytic psychotherapist and counselling psychologist. Del is
co-author (with Robert Snell) of Postmodernism for Psychotherapists
(Brunner Routledge) and is currently completing two research books: What
is Psychotherapeutic Research? (Karnac) and Case Studies in Relational
Research (Palgrave). He is also Editor of the European Journal of

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Psychotherapy, Counselling and Health (Brunner Routledge) and Chair of

the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association.

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