• People are constituted by their relationships, past and present, inner and outer, conscious and unconscious.
• People are agents who experience, know and act on the world. At the heart of your agency is your self: positive, puzzling, and problematic. Colin Kirkwood explores these and other ideas of John Macmurray, Ian Suttie, Ronald Fairbairn, John D Sutherland and Paulo Freire, and shows how they apply in counselling and psychotherapy, adult education, community and society. In today’s world, a set of ideas, attitudes and practices has taken hold, which emphasise the individual, self-centredness, pleasure-seeking, consumption, success and the accumulation of wealth and power. They are deeply harmful and need to be tackled. Colin demonstrates how these ideas affect us, and how they can be taken on and defeated, in a dialogical narrative of psychotherapy with a girl suffering from severe anorexia, written by the girl herself, her psychotherapist and one of her doctors.