This event is included in a series of seminars organised in collaboration with the Therapy and Social Change Network.
The Red Clinic is a collective of communist mental health workers united for a radical psychotherapy, for the care of the oppressed, and for uniting the two in the service of communist politics. We aim to develop truly accessible and sustainable provision of psychotherapy for the working-class and the oppressed in the broadest senses of the terms, attentive to the interrelations between axes of oppression, and transcending national borders. This practice will work in tandem with our efforts to develop a novel theoretical basis for psychotherapy today, informed by Marxist, anti-racist, queer feminist, indigenous, decolonial and radical disability theories, learning from our collective experiences in theoretical application, and honing psychotherapy into a more effective instrument of the communist movement.
The Red Clinic has been actively building solidarity with Palestinian psychotherapists, supporting supervision groups, and working with counsellors, psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who have been speaking out inside their own organisations and publicly about the ongoing war in Gaza.
This talk is about the Red Clinic, and about that solidarity work, and about the social historical context for what is happening now
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Gaining a social historical grounding for comprehending the challenges facing psychotherapists in Palestine
- Enabling an understanding of the role and limits of ‘dialogue’ in the building of alternatives to oppression
- Building capabilities for practically engaging with solidarity work alongside psychotherapeutic practice
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Counsellors, Counselling Psychologists, Psychotherapists, Psychoanalysts, Practitioners and those in training
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- It will deepen understanding of the context for psychotherapy and provide conceptual frame for intervention
Course Content
Organisation
Presenter
Ian Parker is a psychoanalyst and Marxist in Manchester, doing clinical work through The Red Clinic, and political work through Anti-Capitalist Resistance and academic work through the Discourse Unit. His book (co-authored with David Pavón-Cuéllar) Psychoanalysis and Revolution has been published in many languages.
His latest book is Stalinist Realism and Open Communism: Malignant Mirror or Free Association.
The Therapy and Social Change (TaSC) Network is a broad affiliation of people interested in exploring the interface between therapeutic ideas and practices and social justice perspectives and actions. We are interested both in the ways that counselling and psychotherapy can be practiced with social justice concerns in mind (for instance, tackling unconscious biases in the consulting room), and also in the ways that therapeutic principles and practices can be extended out to the wider social realm (for instance, developing social and emotional literacy in schools).
