Hatred of Dependency

Abstract

In the mid-1970s, before entering academic life, I worked in a fairly unique community mental health project. The project was the inspiration of Sue Holland who had been trained at the Tavistock Clinic as an adult psychotherapist and who was a long-time Maoist. The project, the Battersea Action and Counselling Centre, combined community action and various forms of therapeutic interventions, particularly brief psychotherapy with individuals in distress, and work with couples referred to us by the local Women’s Aid organisation. At that time Battersea was a depressed working-class community in London. The project ran a day nursery, a food co-op and a welfare rights service. With local community activists gathered around a community newspaper called Pavement we were involved in a variety of campaigns including anti-fascist work on the local estates and a fight to save a local maternity hospital (Hoggett & Lousada, 1985). Our belief was that you couldn’t address the emotional distress of people living in the area without tackling the social deprivation which was a part of their everyday lives. But we also believed that political action to fight injustice needed to be informed by a vision of human frailties and possibilities. Politics needed to take psychology seriously otherwise it became dehumanised.