Journal and Conference Papers

See also the Edited Books (Spirituality and Psychotherapy) page.

I have put out maybe twice this number of papers. These are the ones I’m happiest with, and/or haven’t lost.

I think my first publication was a paper given at a conference in Dumfries in 1990 and published in the Newsletter of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS’s) Psychotherapy Section in the same year: The Fictional Nature of Introspection (click on title). A lumbering and over-stuffed version titled ‘Polanyi and Introspection’ lead-ballooned at a British Psychological Society (BPS) History & Philosophy of Psychology Section conference a few years later.

Psychotherapy and the White Dodo, which came out in 1995 in the journal Changes, is a would-be humorous piece on wishful thinking in psychotherapy. There are some period touches – I’m rather proud of Virginia Bottomley as the Surrey Puma. Another is my soon-to-be-debunked assumption that there ever was such a bird - see this 2004 paper.

Highest profile, I suppose, are two papers on targeting the HIV-positive population in HIV-prevention. No-one paid much attention, though I got a job interview invitate from an HIV-prevention star in New York (which I demurred – life could have been so different). Who reads journals anyway? But an extra factor was the moral spinelessness of the service culture of the time – click here for a relevant anecdote. HIV Prevention and the Positive Population was in the International Journal of STD & AIDS in 1999; a short piece, Making the Effort Count, was derived from it, though published a year earlier - in New Scientist.

An important paper in my own bumbling journey, and one very relevant to the strong language theme, was in History & Philosophy of Psychology, the journal of the History & Philosophy Section of the BPS, in 2006: The Existential Synapse: Reductionism, Heidegger and Neurophysiology.

I believe that our relation to the natural world is at the crux of any understanding of what we are, of how we should live our lives – an issue much travestied. A Definition of Wilderness is a paper given at the 2010 Oxford conference of the BPS’s Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section.

Last and by no means least a piece on Miller Mair’s role in Dumfries, which appeared in the BPS Clinical Psychology Division’s journal Clinical Psychology Forum in 2016: Miller Mair and the Dumfries Clinical Psychology Department.