Welcome to Transformations! This website is born out of a need to expand our knowledge of transpersonal integrative psychotherapy with children, adolescents and adults, in an informal, interactive setting.

First and foremost, I see Transformations as a resource for students and practitioners: a place for developing thinking, exchanging ideas about their clinical practice and debating the highly fascinating aspects of the transpersonal. All with an emphasis on children and adolescents. In my experience, the material available for transpersonal child psychotherapists is unbelievably thin on the ground. But at the same time I know so many of us out there have worthwhile unpublished material available. Transformations’ editorial policy therefore is one of encouraging trainees, non-professional and non-academic writers to send in their papers for publication online. By worthwhile I mean anything with an original voice, something inspiring, something with a distinctive critical slant, something insightful. Naturally, the same applies to people working with adults, also encouraging people who work as family and couple therapists.

Secondly, I see the website as a means of creating a network, by facilitating contact between like-minded people. For psychotherapists, the ability to hear and be heard by as many people as possible is extremely important. I see our Forum section as essential to this aim.

Thirdly, a word about the more cultural ambitions of Transformations. Very often when writers reflect on psychotherapy at a general level, they can’t help but resurrect good old Freud. But here, I believe, I might just have good reason. In one respect I feel very close to Freud. I believe his thinking was truly revolutionary - perhaps he was one of the few true revolutionaries of the last century. Of course, what followed, from a clinical point of view, was an emphasis on the ego, whose pathology is one of not being able to adapt to the social environment. I hear screams from the transpersonal camp! But for me, Freud is still an inspirational figure. Not least because he was, perhaps unwittingly, a political thinker.

Freud is not a transpersonal psychotherapist, but his discoveries were the milestones of a profound transformation of humankind and society. And since I believe the raison d’etre of psychotherapy to be not only clinical practice, but to expand into politics, culture and the arts, Transformations would welcome any contribution in these areas.