Decolonising psychotherapy and empires of the mind: Opportunities and debates

We're collaborating with the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling (EJPC) on a special issue on ‘Decolonising psychotherapy and empires of the mind: Opportunities and debates,’ and we're issuing a call for papers.

UKCP is affiliated with EJPC, which is an international peer-reviewed journal. All UKCP members have access to previous and current issues of the journal through the member’s area of the UKCP website.

The increasing recognition of the importance of examining postcolonialism in therapeutic practice, together with decolonising training and education, may be experienced both as opportunities and challenges by psychotherapists as well as their clients/patients. There is with Decolonising psychotherapy the vital opportunity to consider what it means for all people to be regarded as equal. This involves concerns about attentiveness, not only to how a client’s culture, practices and experiences may differ from the practitioner’s, but also, crucially, the assumptions the practitioner may hold about notions such as culture, superiority and civilisation. Is it possible to think about these sorts of complex experiences, assumptions and notions, even if they may unsettle and disorientate? Does that render our therapeutic encounters more fruitfully appropriate? Is it essential to at least consider that being trained as a psychotherapist often leads us to overvalue the theories we have been taught, taking them as objective and scientific, without thinking of them as products of Western Europe in the time of colonialism, Empires and population shifts, and therefore in need of careful thought? Yet to achieve this, won’t we first as psychotherapists have to reflect on our own colonial mindsets which we can wrongly normalise? How can we and our clients do this whilst exploring the complexities of pride in our different heritages? How then do we work in a postcolonial way with our clients?

This call for papers, whose subject area is of particular interest to the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling, therefore invites clinicians, theoreticians and researchers to consider the many ways Decolonising psychotherapy can influence psychotherapeutic practices, theories and research.

The papers invited for this special issue can include a variety topics and contexts stemming from such questions as:

• Can psychotherapists and clients identify with European cultures without being colonial?
• What are the challenges when working with clients from non-European backgrounds if our psychotherapeutic theories are Eurocentric?
• Are all European psychotherapeutic cultures colonial and all colonial psychotherapeutic cultures European?
• What can we learn as psychotherapists of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds from other academic disciplines that have been exploring issues of postcolonialism?
• As psychotherapists how does our pride, and/or shame, regarding our personal and psychotherapeutic histories help and hinder our clients/patients?
• What would it mean to decolonise our and our clients’/patients’ lives?
• What are postcolonial methodologies?
• To what extent should we, and can we, decolonise psychotherapy trainings?

For a paper to be considered, it must be based on original research, which cannot be found elsewhere. It can be about practice, including case studies, developments in theory, empirical research, or research methods. Please provide Prof Del Loewenthal, editorinchief.ejpc@gmail.com, with a provisional title and abstract, up to 200 words, by 15 January 2025. We will inform you by 31 January 2025 whether your proposed paper has been accepted for consideration. We will require your paper, 4,000 to 5,000 words, to be sent to us by 15 April 2025.