https://holisticelephants.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/welcome/
This is my blog which expands upon my latest book and gives titles of the next books that will appear.
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My books all work from a contextual perspective: the best way to understand why people do what they do is to observe and describe their many and varied (external) life contexts.
This must include social, cultural, economic, colonized, patriarchal, discursive, opportunity and other contexts. If you do not 'see' someone's life contexts, you will not understand them. You will invent fictions of an 'inside' world.
There is no inside world for people. Our experiences of an 'inside' world are all about the language we use, our many discourses, but most of these do not get said out loud nd so they 'feel' like they are 'inside' us. They are really shaped outside of us in our contexts of life, but nicely, this also means that we can observe the contexts for all this 'unsaid talking' and thereby 'see' thinking. This is good for 'therapy'.
Finally, I have recently been using this approach to contextualize what we currently call 'mental health' and this leads to a whole new way of understanding people's behaviours which get labelled and new ways to help them. There are two new books on this and another new one soon on "contextualising therapy".
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Bernard Guerin is Professor of Psychology at the University of South Australia, where he teaches social and community behaviour, language and discourse, and social science interventions. He trained at the Universities of Adelaide (Ph.D.) and Queensland (Postdoctoral), and then taught at James Cook University and the University of Waikato (NZ).
He has published 12 books, including Handbook of interventions for changing people and communities (2005) and Handbook for analyzing the social strategies of everyday life (2004). He has recently summarized his ideas in a new trilogy: How to rethink psychology: New metaphors for understanding people and their behavior (2016), How to rethink human behavior: A practical guide to social contextual analysis, and How to rethink mental illness: The human contexts behind the labels. A fourth volume of the trilogy is underway…
Most of his research is now focused on working alongside communities, primarily on issues of responding to racism, mental health, mobility, sustainability of communities, and attachment to country. He has worked in partnership with Indigenous Australian, Māori, Somali refugee, and migrant communities. His broader goal has been to integrate social and community psychology with the other social sciences into an interdisciplinary framework that can be used for practical analysis and intervention.
