PSYCHO DAY fascinating

Well the first QI 'psychology' day was really interesting.

My keynote (start of day) was on:

Magical realist pathways into and under the psychotherapeutic imaginary

abstract as follows:

My experience of people’s life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilized distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people’s daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the literatures of counselling. In this keynote I speculate about the possible reasons for ‘smoothing’ magical realities into rational realist accounts within the literature of counselling. I tell short stories that illustrate people’s magical/realist manoeuvres out of impossible life circumstances towards different possibilities. I argue that just as writers on the margins have subversively written themselves into different spaces, people at the social and psychological margins have found equally imaginative pathways around life’s walls.

The abstract had not gone into the programme for some reason, so i read it out to people, just so they knew what they were in for...and afterwards invited anybody who felt they were in the wrong slot to go shopping instead...at which point two women got up and went out ..whooooo!!! I hadn't actually meant BEFORE I'd bored them silly...

anyway it went well in the end i think. Very few of them were practitioners, they were mostly mainstream psychology researchers, but all had an interest in qualitative inquiry so they were interested in the ideas if not the practices...and were definitely rivetted by the stories I told from therapeutic conversations...it is the stories that get people's attention every time.

Later on in the afternoon Amia Lieblich 'simply' told two interlocking powerful stories from her life and then asked us if we thought it was qualitative inquiry.... I loved that!!

I won't stick my keynote up, although these ideas and stories are being published in various ways and there may be a publication to come out of the day's presentations. I'll show you a collage of some of the pictures i used as illustrations...it was a good slide show!

 (photomerge of slides including paintings by Chagall (promenade), Magritte (false mirror) and Gina Litherland (Chimera) , photographs from Gothic images, photo-images, anthropologists.com and ESTUDIOS PICASSO, TEQUILA GANG y ESPERANTO FILMOJ.

Apart from enjoying the keynote and being asked some very useful questions I was really struck by a conversation we got into about the overlapping relationships between research interviews and therapy during the afternoon session that got really heated. 

I'm with Art Bochner, who made a distinction between the therapeutic nature of much human interaction and time spent in a designated 'therapy' session. 

However, there seems to be a real  concern about the 'ethics' of straying between mentoring, coaching, interviewing and counselling ( as if these were hard and fast boundaries) amongst the North Americans in particular. There was a lot of talk about the difference between paying someone as a therapist (the client's agency) and being asked to take part in a study (the researcher's  agency) ... as if there was no such thing as invited/cooperative inquiry. 

The 'end of the day' keynote came from Mark Freeman  (author of 'Hindsight' etc). His practice is deeply rooted in phenomenology, so he had different heroes from me, and at times went on about 'the region of truth' and 'real' events a little too much...but he was a fabulous speaker with an important critique of the 'positivist' lobby in that he was saying that if he want to get as close to reality as we possibly can, to how things are for human beings as they live their lives, then we have to get up as s close as we can,which of course is a subjective position. He also argued that  the critique of narrative as a looking back and a distortion can be countered with the sense that narrative inquiries tell us more about what is humanly real than a detached analysis of moment to moment reality (which is also impossible to achieve...)

Everybody has arrived in Urbana now, Donna West arrived last night and came straight out to supper with us all at the bread company, which was strawberry salads as usual.