About the Author

John McLeod has a degree and PhD in psychology from Edinburgh University, followed by post-doctoral research at the University of Oxford, and training as a person-centred counsellor and psychotherapist. He has held positions as a counsellor educator and researcher at Wolverhampton, Keele and Abertay Universities in the UK, and visiting professor appointments at Massey University Aotearoa New Zealand, University of Padua, University of Oslo, and the Institute for Integrative Counselling and Psychotherapy in Dublin. His primary professional identity is as a counsellor and member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, whose practice has been based in community and private practice front-line services, supporting clients with a wide range of presenting issues. His academic work has been characterised by three main themes: the relevance of qualitative and case study research as a source of knowledge to inform and enrich therapy practice; narrative and socio-political perspectives on the aims and process of therapy; and, the development of flexible, co-produced pluralistic ways of working with clients. The present book, An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy, was first published in 1993, and has functioned as an on-going personal and professional learning project that has consistently served as a reminder of the immense creativity and diversity of the global counselling and psychotherapy community. 

The personal dimension of this story is that I am a White, straight Scottish man, with a working class family background, who has enjoyed a privileged career as a writer, university teacher, and counselling practitioner. I was born in Dundee, which has historic trade links with India through the jute trade. At the end of the second wold war, my father worked for a jute manufacturer in Calcutta (Kolkata). I spent the first five years of my life there, being looked after by servants, before returning to Dundee to start my education at a State primary school. Despite the advantages associated with being brought up in a loving family, these experiences of being a cultural outsider led to a sustained effort in my adolescence and early adult life, to learn how to cope with anxieties around not belonging. These initiatives included self-study and participation in many different types of therapy, spiritual practice, and political activism, and a psychology degree. I am therefore one of the many counsellors and psychotherapists who found their way into the profession through first being a client or service user. By the time I was able to see that I could offer something back, and entered training as a therapist in my mid-30s, I had already accumulated first-hand experience of most forms of therapy. So, while I learned a lot from training as a person-centred counsellor and psychotherapist, I always knew that there existed a wide range of other therapies that could also be effective. Eventually, from the early 2000s, I gradually became able to resolve the tension I felt within myself, between the coherence of a single-theory approach to practice, and the possibilities afforded by other equally credible and helpful approaches, by working with colleagues to develop what has become known as a collaborative or co-constructed pluralistic framework for practice. 

A crucial dimension of my development as a therapist, educator, researcher and writer, has been my growing appreciation and understanding of the enormous significance of the love, care and mutual support that exists within families and communities. I believe that these networks or webs of care have been greatly eroded by the emergence and continued influence of colonialist and neoliberal ways of organising and thinking about society. In my view, the growing popularity and acceptance of counselling and psychotherapy over the course of the twentieth century, occurred because a relationship with a therapist offered strategies for both fitting in with an increasingly rapid pace of social change and consumerisation, while retaining some sense of personal wholeness and integrity. The experience of entering the final chapter of my life, and in particular what it means to be a grandparent, has made it possible for me to stand back from my professional roles, and take stock of what is actually happening in the world and where counselling and psychotherapy fits into that world. The 7th edition of An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy is my attempt to articulate my fears about the future we are all creating, and how counselling, psychotherapy, and allied professions, can contribute to collectively moving forward in a more sustainable and equitable world. We are at a point in history when human action has triggered an inevitable and gradually unfolding degree of ecological collapse that may, with enormous collective solidarity and effort be mitigated, but is extremely unlikely to be avoided. At the same time, State-organised violence and brutality is taking place in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and other places, foreshadowing increasing investment in militarisation at the expense of social justice and care. Threaded through these developments is the corruption of democratic process and the capacity for open dialogue and respect for truth, resulting from oligarchic ownership and control of the technology of communication.

Up until quite recently, it has been sufficient for counselling and psychotherapy to offer tools and ideas to help individuals, couples and families to build more satisfying lives. At a fundamental level, therapy is fuelled by a sense of hopefulness and confidence that difficult personal experiences can be understood and resolved. What is starting to become clear is that there is an urgent necessity to learn how to re-purpose and augment these tools and ideas, to become better able to support individuals, couples and families to be actively involved in repairing society and the more-than-human world. The hope and energy that such a shift is possible, and that therapy can be re-imagined along these lines, comes not from mainstream establishment figures such as me, but from students, practitioners, service users, and community groups from the margins of therapy and the borderlands between it and other forms of social action. Such an agenda needs to be able to see therapy through a wider historical perspective, and draw on traditions of critical inquiry that allow taken-for-granted assumptions about therapy to be questioned. The 7th edition of An Introduction to Counselling and Psychotherapy does not offer definitive answers to these challenges. What it tries to accomplish, instead, to provide entry points to significant current initiatives, and roads not travelled in the past, that can be building blocks and stepping stones that allow us all to move in a different direction.