Abstract
What do you do in your moments of despair upon hearing or seeing the latest horror that human beings have inflicted upon each other – in your own neighbourhood or thousands of miles away from it? Sometimes, what happens with me is that a certain phrase or two will ‘pop into my head’ and ground me, by which I mean allow me to locate the horrific events in the contradictory totality of human history and its dialectic with human society, in the human capacity to continuously overthrow (recreate) that which we have created. One of these phrases is a quote from the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky: ‘A revolution solves only those tasks raised by history’ (Vygotsky, quoted in frontispiece, Levitin 1982). Another is from French cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer: ‘One does not cure neurosis, one changes a society which cannot do without it’ (1977). And a third was spoken by Dr Martin Luther King Jr: ‘The salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted’ (King 1956). Each of these propositions speaks to me in the performative: ‘Don’t mourn, organize!’ They convey not a critical but a practical-critical approach to the therapy professions.
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© 2015 Lois Holzman
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Holzman, L. (2015). Relating to People as Revolutionaries. In: Loewenthal, D. (eds) Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460585_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137460585_8
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