Professor Paul Barber

PhD, MSc, BA, RNT, SRN, RMN, RNMS, UKCP Registered Psychotherapist, Fellow Roffey Park Institute

Personal and professional signposts

I was born in the small salt-mining town of Middlewich, Cheshire, Northern England to a working-class family with few aspirations and fewer answers to the mysteries of life, so I was driven to search elsewhere.  Canals and smokey factory chimneys against a backdrop of horse-drawn ploughs and canal barges, black and white cows, freezing fog, cold bedrooms and outside loos populate my images of this time!

As family life was difficult I drew upon nature and wildlife for my inspiration - and still do.  After a thorny childhood, I exercised my rebelliousness with a three year period at art college followed by two years as a deck-hand on the Manchester Ship Canal.  Having become 'an artist' and read Hemmingway and Steinbeck, I felt a need to reclaim my manhood and working-class roots through manual labour!  Art and creative expression still inform the intuitive base of my life and work.

In my 20th year I escaped to London.  During the 1970s I trained in psychiatric nursing at Epsom (St Ebbas & Long Grove Hospitals) and the Henderson Hospital, before establishing a therapeutic community in acute mental health within Belmont Hospital.  Having undertaken a Social Science and Arts Degree with the Open University, a social model of psychiatry focussed upon 'the community as client' greatly appealed to me.  When I became a nurse tutor this drive towards socio-cultural change inspired me to initiate experiential learning in psychiatric nursing, which eventually infiltrated the national curriculum. 

During this period I began training in martial arts (Karate), undertook an MSc in Education and Administration at Edinburgh University, married and became a father.  I developed immensely watching my son Marc grow, reliving through him my own childhood and earlier life challenges.  I also attended encounter groups within the Human Potential Research Group at the University of Surrey with John Heron and James Kilty and trained in humanistic psychology.  Humanism and therapeutic community principles of reality confrontation, democratic process, community and permissiveness inform me still. 

In the 1980s I applied humanism and therapeutic community practice to education and the public sector.  After being recruited to the Royal College of Nursing to develop nurse tutors, I joined with the Association of Therapeutic Communities and group analysts from the Tavistock and Institute of Group Analysis to initiate a programme in Therapeutic Community Practice for medics, social workers and nurses.  Squaring humanism and Gestalt with group analysis was not easy.

I trained to black-belt in Aikido and Iaido (Japanese sword-work), and travelled throughout the UK as an educational consultant validating Project 2000 courses for the UKCC (now the Nursing and Midwifery Council).  Having become 'respectable' quite surprised me, but I realised to foster lasting cultural change you had first to be accepted, then facilitate from the inside.

Then, in my 40th year, an old birth injury flared up and my diaphragm split.  I spent six months recuperating and completed my doctorate in group facilitation.  On the research and change agent front I co-authored the first text on supervision for nurses helping spearhead supervision and reflective practice in the nursing profession, and edited the first text applying holistic care to mental handicap.

In this decade I trained as a Gestalt therapist at the Metanoia Institute with Professor Petruska Clarkson (a great teacher) and Sue Fish (a great therapist), before leaving to train further at Gestalt Southwest with Professor Malcolm Parlett (a lively explorer) and Marianne Fry (an uncompromising and loving soul).  Marianne was heavily transpersonal, intuitive and fiercely compassionate - in a Zen warrior way.

I divorced during this period.  I guess I was moving very quickly and repeated my family leaving pattern of earlier, though I stayed close to my son who I didn't want to be fatherless like myself; my father having died a month prior to my birth.  I learnt to be a change agent during this time and tailored my facilitative arts to express my intrinsic humanistic and counter-cultural stance.  I still put myself and everything to question, but thankfully temper this with compassion.

In the 1990s I applied humanism, Gestalt and group analysis to education, being recruited by the Human Potential Research Group at the University of Surrey to design and co-deliver an MSc in Change Agent Skills and Strategies - the first programme of its kind.  My facilitation of the ‘Developing Groups and Teams’ strand drew attention from industry, which in turn led to an academic-commercial partnership to deliver this MSc in a commercial setting as a vehicle for organisational learning and cultural renewal.  This partnership subsequently sired the UK’s first MSc in Management Consultancy.  In terms of research, I conducted action research and collaborative inquiry into Gestalt therapy, co-authored with my client, which was celebrated in two consecutive editions of the British Gestalt Journal.  Professionally, my creativity was, and is still, directed towards making the organisation a fit home for the human spirit.

Sadly, my son died in the mid 90s; he was 24 and we had become best friends.  His death was the last great adventure we shared together.  Witnessing him die opened my heart and renewed my commitment to spirit.  Marc is with me still.

More recently, in the 21st Century I have acquired an international audience and been propelled into illuminating the potential of Gestalt to resolve conflict and to build communities through the holistic process of its phenomenological inquiry.  I teach Gestalt, group facilitation, clinical philosophy and research, counselling and organisational consultancy in university settings, and have researched and published widely on health, therapy and organisational change.  I have authored a book dovetailing humanism, spirituality and Gestalt to qualitative inquiry and I'm working on two other titles.  I also supervise Gestalt, humanistic and psychodynamic therapists and consultants. 

Anna, my partner, came into my life in the 1980s.  We met as nurse tutors – and at another level as rebels and warriors, never compromising but remaining fully committed to the other.  She chose a psychodynamic route towards psychotherapy, and for many years we co-facilitated a therapy group where she worked outside the therapeutic relationship, in the analytic tradition, and I mined further within it in Gestalt fashion!  We also travelled widely and shared a spiritual path together, as well as roaming car-boot sales and downing pints of real ale in far-flung hostelries.  Sadly, Anna has developed Alzheimer’s and has been unable to co-facilitate in recent years.  Today she lives very much in the moment - everything really is 'now’.  She is enjoying the happy childhood she never had.

So who am I and what is my dharma?  I am at core a Gestalt practitioner informed by humanism, group analysis and Taoism, who seeks to help individuals, groups, communities and the wider society heal themselves though facilitative inquiry into the influences we draw together to co-construct our world view.  I have found that when we awake to where we are now, options open before us and we are changed!  Gestalt and compassionate awareness in service of experiential inquiry is my spiritual discipline.  In the middle of nowhere.