Despite a plethora of texts on the 'wounded healer', little systematic research has been conducted on unpacking the implications and embedded assumptions of this concept. This paper takes the 'wounded healer' into the research arena by approaching it reflexively as an analytic tool to explore therapists' personal and professional development. Six therapeutic practitioners who identified with the concept were selected by means of theoretical sampling and were interviewed with a view to provide a narrative of their development as 'wounded healers'. Interviews were analysed using a tailored, multi-lens approach within a narrative epistemology. Besides attending to the narrative features of the accounts, the paper discusses findings in relation to three key themes: 'entering a community of wounded healers'; 'formulating the wounded healer'; and 'deconstructing the wounded healer'. Unpacking this modality flexible yet historically loaded construct necessitates challenging the 'wounded healer' as fixed identity and replacing it with an ethos that can lead to training, supervisory, and clinical recommendations facilitating psychotherapists' reflection on their woundedness. This complex process could allow them to engage in all aspects of professional practice, including research, from a position of an expert by both experience and training.

Miltiades Hadjiosif is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist and a Scholar of the Alexander S Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. He is Senior Lecturer in Counselling Psychology at the University of the West of England and sits on the Committee of the British Psychological Societ''s Community Psychology Section. His research focuses on discursive dimensions of psychotherapeutic constructs.Adrian Coyle is Professor of Social Psychology at Kingston University London. His areas of research expertise concern identity, psychology and religion, loss and bereavement, and qualitative research methods. With Evanthia Lyons, he was co-editor of Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology (SAGE, 2016). AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Our heartfelt appreciation goes to our key informants for their time and enduring interest in our work. Special thanks to Giannis Papazachos for sound mixing an audio clip to play at conferences where we have presented a version of this paper. Word count: 6729 (excluding references and Appendix) Psychotherapy in pop song lyrics 2 'That boy needs therapy': Constructions of psychotherapy in popular song lyrics Abstract Despite a plethora of academic and clinical descriptions of psychotherapy, less research attention has been focused on the ways in which psychotherapy is talked about and represented in popular culture. This study investigates constructions of psychotherapy in the lyrics of popular songs and identifies the vocabularies, versions and relevant discourses that are invoked or crafted. A critical discourse analysis was applied to 24 songs and yielded three broad themes: 'Banal therapy', the 'Non-therapeutic relationship' and 'I know therefore I can'. These discursive objects are examined in light of a constructionist understanding of knowledge and power within a discussion of how their interplay is implicated in the status of psychotherapeutic concepts and practices as 'expert knowledge'. Some clinical implications are attended to without making claims that this study has identified ontological representations of psychotherapy in popular culture.

Content and FocusThis paper explores how Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) elaborates upon the concept of validation as a strategic intervention and therapeutic stance. It examines the rationale for validating the ‘grain of wisdom’ in every client communication and problematic behaviour and outlines levels of validation articulated by Marsha Linehan and her colleagues before linking them to counselling psychology practice.ConclusionsValidation is consistent with the humanistic underpinnings of counselling psychology that necessitate an appreciation of client phenomenology devoid of pathologising and pejorative assumptions. DBT’s focus on this intervention is illuminating yet conceptualising it as a strategy traversing the ‘acceptancechange’ dialectic might estrange us from validating our clients when attending to more process-oriented issues in therapy.

Content and FocusPerson-centred therapy (PCT) and psychodynamic therapy frequently comprise two of the modalities that counselling psychologists are exposed to during their training, while the key concepts drawn from these domains continue to inform the practice of chartered counselling psychologists. Rogers’ ideas came at a time when psychodynamic thinking had established a firm grip over therapeutic orthodoxy and challenged the practice of psychoanalysis, even as they circumvented its theoretical underpinnings. This paper explores the extent to which the six necessary and sufficient, or core, conditions of therapeutic change can manifest in a psychodynamic therapy encounter. The author reviews relevant literature that juxtaposes PCT and psychodynamic understandings of therapeutic theory and practice whilst examining each of the conditions sequentially in the light of some key psychodynamic concepts.ConclusionsThe question posed by this paper requires an idiosyncratic answer that can be neither authoritatively nor objectively obtained. It is argued that our discipline’s epistemological position might facilitate a diffusion of the core conditions into the implicit theoretical apparatus that Sandler (1983) has identified as guiding the practice of psychoanalysts. I reflect on my personal journey of grappling with this issue before tentatively arriving at the conclusion that the conditions can indeed be present in psychodynamic practice, even if noticeably absent from psychodynamic theory.