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Dale, Heather

Book review: Personification: using the dialogical self in psychotherapy and counselling, John Rowan, Routledge 2009

Original Citation

Dale, Heather (2010) Book review: Personification: using the dialogical self in psychotherapy and counselling, John Rowan, Routledge 2009. The Independent Practitioner. pp. 24-25.

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debate issues that are of concern and Our quarterly journal Thresholds may interest to people in this sector, we contain – in a single issue – articles promote members’ research and celebrating links between Hindu values encourage dialogue and networking. and person-centred therapy, exploring Reviews spirituality and pain, opening up The executive of the division is always research on prayer and mental health, keen to hear from you. You can looking at the challenges and crises check out who’s who at: www.bacp that affect faith communities, offering Personification: using workplace.org.uk/exec_profile.php original viewpoints on healing, and the dialogical self in much more. We even welcome atheist psychotherapy and Additionally, Rick Hughes, BACP’s contributors who seek to convince us counselling Lead Advisor, Workplace, bridges the that spiritual beliefs are all nonsense John Rowan gap between the division and BACP – and get very lively responses! Routledge 2009 to champion campaigns and echo the ISBN 978-7415-433464 £19.99 voice of counselling in the workplace. Our conferences draw outstanding reviews from members and non- r John Rowan Please do check out our website at members alike, for their careful does not just www.bacpworkplace.org.uk and if you preparation, warm atmosphere and Dhate practise as a workplace counsellor or stimulating content. Our most recent academia, he also work with or in organisations, you’re gathering looked at spirituality as an hates academics, most welcome to come and join our ethical essential for counselling and because ‘they are community. psychotherapy. Our next conference, all about control’. in September 2011, will look at the Actually, he has impact of spirituality on ourselves as strong feelings Association for Pastoral and practitioners and on our practice. about quite a lot of things. NLP Spiritual Care and Counselling (neuro-linguistic programming), for (APSCC) Our ‘task groups’ are working on a example, is, according to him, Are you... range of issues as diverse as spirituality ‘relentlessly adolescent and trivial’. interested in spirituality and how it and therapy in new and emerging engages with your working life? communities, and training in working It comes as no surprise then, to open to acknowledging and working with spiritual issues in therapy, including discover that this is not an academic with the deep spiritual beliefs of your work in mental health settings. book, if that term is intended to clients? Or wondering how to be? convey a reasoned argument leading making your own spiritual journey, We have also recently launched our to conclusions that may be flawed, along whatever path you have found? website (www.apscc.org.uk) offering but are at least logical. Rowan’s many resources to our members. This book is more of an impassioned APSCC is BACP’s division for those continues to evolve. A new feature is plea to integrate psychotherapies, who see spiritual issues as at least an online diary showcasing CPD and for therapists to work more in potentially important in any opportunities. the moment, with an emphasis on therapeutic work. The division is paying attention to the client’s neither ‘only for Christians’ nor ‘only APSCC is a rapidly growing and different (and warring) voices. These for religious people’. We are explicitly dynamic group. Come and join us! voices are collectively called ‘the committed to being an open and Contact [email protected] or dialogical self’. Rowan has written diverse group, bringing into join online at www.apscc.org.uk on this topic previously, but his new conversation not only different spiritual understanding is that all these voices traditions but also an enormous range are equally valid – not sub- of therapeutic approaches. personalities, but personalities of equal worth. One of the things we often hear at divisional conferences and other In taking seriously this ‘multiplicity meetings is how good it is to have of voices’, Rowan posits that there found a place where these issues can are five stages to cure or change, be freely discussed. Especially for from listening and accepting, independent practitioners having through to coordination, integration like-minded and open-hearted and synthesis. Rowan also gives three colleagues can be a tremendous rules for using his approach: support. APSCC maintains, through spontaneity, listening and creativity. our journal and other methods, a lively, These strike me as good rules for challenging and open conversation. Chris Jenkins, Chair of APSCC any therapist, and perhaps add to

Winter 2010 The Independent Practitioner 24 reviews

his argument for integration of right. Some of the people he is so This is quite a short book, of 146 therapies. These are ideas that give contemptuous of were actually great pages of text. However, it is not until food for thought, although I was thinkers of their day and their chapter six that Rowan says that he concerned that there is no mention contributions deserve a more has come to the ‘real meat’ of the made of the fact that sometimes, at considered appraisal. book. More than halfway through the extreme end, these voices can seems quite a long wait for the meat. be so powerful that disassociation In this section, Rowan explains the The starter should be a prelude to (when one personality becomes so ‘serious research’ behind this approach. the main course, rather than equally powerful that there may be an I struggled to follow what he meant, substantial. unknown gap in time for the as his research seemed to be based normally-dominant personality) may, on single case studies (though from In conclusion, this is a book about and can, occur. different therapists). Case studies are an experience that, he says, cannot usually interesting, and can often help be named, that language will only The book is divided into three unequal to bring to life a theoretical point, distort and misrepresent, and in parts, with an introduction that sets but there are inherent dangers in trying to do that, he has set himself out the aims of the book: to question generalising from anecdotal evidence. an impossible task. It may be that the idea of any absolute truth in this review, in using language as it psychotherapy, and to critique the This part of the book also introduces does, also distorts and misrepresents. literature on sub-personalities (with the reader to a subject that Rowan is However, in the end, this is a book the ‘secret’ desire to influence passionate about – reification. This whose style comes across as hectoring current writers and thinkers on the means taking a theoretical concept and lecturing. Passion is a wonderful subject of the dialogical self). (such as Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego) thing, but if it is also meant to educate and treating it as if it is a real entity and convince it may need to be Part one serves as an introduction to and therefore unchallengeable. Whilst tempered with reason. the topic, and lays the groundwork I have long noticed this phenomenon for what will come next. It defines I had not known that it had a name. Heather Dale is a senior accredited the dialogical self as ‘the warring therapist and trainer in independent voices in our head’. Rowan’s method Again, this part includes very full practice, and senior lecturer, University is to quote extensively from writers quotations from other writers. There of Huddersfield. he admires, as if because they say are simply too many of these. They something, then it must be right. In interfere with the flow of the order to do this, he goes as far back narrative, and take away from the as Plato, and demonstrates an experience of hearing Rowan’s own Jay Haley revisited impressive knowledge of the subject. original voice. Madeleine Richeport-Haley, Jon However, there are points when there Carlson (eds) are so many of these quotations that In the last, short section of the book, Routledge 2010 they begin to merge into a quasi Rowan discusses the potential for ISBN 978-0415805339 £22.50 biblical theme, full of begots and working with the client’s different begats. voices. This, in some ways is the ay Haley most pertinent, as well as the most revisited is a Part two, the main section, begins with interesting part of the book, as Rowan Jcollection of a history of the use of multiplicity in allows himself to discuss working 20 papers, written therapy, and moves on to criticise transpersonally, or spiritually, and by Haley between many of the current therapies, without using this as a bridge to cross religious 1958-2001. When I properly critiquing them. Given that or cultural differences. saw that one of the this is a book whose expressed intent editors was Haley’s is to offer a theory that could integrate Dr Rowan is passionate about his wife, my first the different psychotherapies, it is a beliefs but he allows no room for reaction was to be a little dubious. little surprising that Rowan allows doubters – Perls is wrong (though on Wives can view their spouse’s himself to be quite so rude about so the right lines) Berne is wrong (though writing through rose-tinted many of them. In just one chapter, Clarkson gets close), everyone but spectacles – and persuade others to for example, he says that Freud is those who accept his ideas are – so I was pleased to see that each questionable, Jung needs a new look, simply wrong. He does not so much paper is introduced by a different Perls has problems, Berne is over- try to convince the reader of the colleague from the related fields of simplified, there are difficulties with viability of his ideas, as to assume psychology, psychiatry, social psychodrama, Shapiro is too fixed, that he is right, and therefore others psychology, marital and family therapy NLP is insanely pragmatic, as well as are wrong. I found this approach or counselling academics/teachers/ relentlessly trivial and adolescent, simply baffling. Broad assertions are lecturers. These introductions are and, by extension, Rowan alone is not the same as argued points. really useful and insightful.

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