Miller Mair

Miller Mair had a key role in the establishment of Personal Construct Psychology in Britain. He also ran a busy clinical psychology department for more than 20 years. Another Way of Knowing's underlying structure is of an autobiography – one which is both 'intellectual' and 'personal', the two modes inevitably intertwined. His psychotherapeutic thinking grew a long way out from its PCP foundation, though it stayed deeply rooted in it. But Miller's supple and questing sensibility, seemingly there from the start but powerfully validated by George Kelly's work, reached out towards much wider horizons than those of psychology and psychotherapy. There is much in this book, implicitly or explicitly, about politics, science and scientism, spirituality, the arts, the human condition in general. It is also a book about writing the book, and the often anguished struggle Miller had with it.

In this highly original and thought-provoking work the late Miller Mair puts forward his ideas for a new psychology. First published in 1989, he deals with issues of fundamental importance to the future of a psychology guided by genuine enquiry and concern rather than mere professional self-interest. Crossing and re-crossing boundaries between psychology, psychotherapy and philosophy, and between ‘science’ and ‘art’, he demonstrates the linkages between the personal and the impersonal, subject and object, inside and outside, with a daring not previously risked by anyone working in the area. Dr Mair stresses the importance of a poetic approach in psychology and psychotherapy, and the need to explore and understand the nature of psychology through an imaginative freedom of language. He emphasizes that a poetic awareness and attentiveness is fundamental to any pursuit of understanding of ourselves or others. This is a very personal book, concerned with personal knowledge , but it is meant for anyone who seeks to understand themselves and others, and what is involved in coming to such understanding. Focusing on ordinary human experience, and moving towards literary and artistic modes of expression, the author invites you to enter in, follow what you think and feel, as he proposes a radical revision of much that is accepted in psychology and in psychotherapy.

The World Library of Mental Health celebrates the important contributions to mental health made by leading experts in their individual fields. Each author has compiled a career-long collection of what they consider to be their finest extracts from books, journals, articles, major theoretical and practical contributions, and salient research findings. Miller Mair, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, devoted his life to developing a psychology that provided a radical alternative to the behavioural, and latterly cognitive-behavioural, approaches that have dominated the field. He presented this work in a wide range of publications and conference papers, and prior to his untimely death in 2011 he had selected a number of these for a volume of his collected works. This book is based upon Miller’s selection, and includes several previously unpublished papers as well as others that are now out of print. Miller was considerably influenced by George Kelly’s personal construct psychology, as is apparent in most of his writings. However, his papers on psychology and psychotherapy also draw upon an extraordinarily wide range of other fields of knowledge, including imagery; metaphor; storytelling and narrative; rhetoric; discourse and conversation; poetry; and spirituality. These concerns are reflected in the contributions selected for this volume, which also demonstrate the variation in his style of writing from the more conventionally academic to the personal and poetic as he developed a ‘poetics of experience’ and a stance of ‘conversational inquiry’. Miller’s final publication was entitled ‘Enchanting psychology’, and it is hoped that this volume will provide an antidote to the disenchantment that many readers may feel with mechanistic and reductionist approaches in psychology and its clinical applications, and more generally in health service rhetoric and policies. As these writings vividly demonstrate, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist can, and should, also be a poet, artist, and storyteller. The volume will be of value to readers previously unfamiliar with Miller’s ideas, but also to those who know his work, who will find here the first published selection of his papers.