The Politics of Help

In this issue, a number of contributors deal with the question of self-help and the helping professions. They analyse strategies within self-help groups for those diagnosed with anxiety disorders; programmes for at-risk young people in rural areas; and new techniques of management of health risk in nursing. The contributors argue that self-help strategies, along with other apparently empowering programmes, can be intimately linked to less than liberatory practices of governance of the self. And they argue for approaches more fully aware of the complexities of emotional life.
Other contributions include: a look at Lacanian psychoanalysis as an analytic framework for talk analysis; a psychoanalytic account of Lolita online that looks at smoking fetishisation and the sexualisation of girls; a discussion of narratives of pioneering women educators and the discourses that constitute women as political subjects; an examination of the ways that 'difference' and 'foreignness' are accomplished in Romanian talk about Romanies; and an exploration of the relationship between critical psychology and the anti-capitalist movement, which raises wider questions of the relationship between radical academic and intellectual work and the politics of activism.