Chris Robertson
Crossing a Threshold
I have been a psychotherapist and trainer since 1978. Before that in the late sixties I studied meditation in India for nine months and on return trained as a school teacher. On qualifying I worked with troubled adolescents in comprehensive schools whose challenge took me to my own therapy. I attended many humanistic groups in the early 1970s and went on to study child psychotherapy, psychosynthesis and family therapy. Since reading Hillman’s Revisioning Psychology, I consider myself to be a student of archetypal psychology and attempt to put soulmaking into practice. Another major influence is David Abram who manages to write how I only dream (Becoming Animal & The Spell of the Sensuous).
What this linear bio doesn't show is how blessed I have been with people I have learned with. Nor does it reveal my tendency to stay on the edge, the margins - that liminal space where much is possible. An early workshop, later filmed by the BBC, was called 'The Borderlands and the Wisdom of Uncertainty'.
In 1988 I co-founded ReVision (http://www.re-vision.org.uk), an integrative psychotherapy training with soulful perspective from which I retired in 2018. The ecological and climate crisis led me to an involvement with Ecopsychology and the Climate Psychology Alliance with which I later became a chair. Ecopsychology and Climate Psychology both explore the psyche outside the consulting room and how the damaging hyper-individualism of the West needs cultural reparation for its destructive consequences.
After fifty years I have now retired from working with clients and am focusing on bringing psychotherapeutic perspectives and skills to cultural interventions.
Publications
Psychotherapy at a cultural threshold in Climate Psychology and Change Ed. Steffi Bednarek (2024) North Atlantic
The Psychological Work of Being-With the Climate Crisis in Being a Therapist at the Time of Climate Breakdown Ed. Anderson et al.(2024) Routledge
On Ageing: Coming Home in Jung's Shadow Concept: The Hidden Light and Darkness within Ourselves Ed. Perry & Tower. (2023) Routledge
Holding and Being Held: Group work and Ecoanxiety in Context: Group Analytic Society International (2023) https://groupanalyticsociety.co.uk/contexts
Co-author with Wendy Hollway, Paul Hoggett & Sally Weintrobe Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death (2022)Phoenix
Contributed the chapter ‘Culture Crisis’ to Depth Psychology and Climate Change: the Green Book: Mathers (ed). (2020) Routledge
Co-editor and contributor to the ReVision anthology Transformation in Troubled Times (2018) Transpersonal Press
Contributed the chapter ‘Dangerous Margins’ to the anthology Vital Signs (2012) Karnac,
Co-author of Emotions and Needs (2002) OUP
Co-edited the Psychotherapist (2016: 63) on Climate Change, Despair and Radical Hope.
Author of several articles including, Hungry Ghosts: Psychotherapy, control and the winds of homecoming (Self & Society 2014), Ecopsychology’s Wilding (PPI 2013), The Numinous Psyche IJP (Vol. 18, 2012).
Video
Co-creator of Borderlands and the Wisdom of Uncertainty course, which in 1989 became the subject of a BBC documentary.
Paradoxical Perspectives on Cultural Psychotherapy: presentation for Climate Change, nearly carbon free conference: University California 2016.