Denis Postle A.R.C.A.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art, I initially pursued a career at the BBC and with independent TV in the UK as a filmmaker, writing and directing broadcast documentaries about MIT, Carl Jung, Moonrocks, Paul Ehrlich, Catastrophe Theory, High Energy Physics, Doctors, Human Nature and Cooperative Inquiry. Two decades later, after training as a facilitator, I became an independent researcher and developed a form of psychopractice in which I draw on this creative lifework as a film-maker, musician, husband, photographer, graphic artist, grandfather and, until recently, ship owner.

My 30 years of psychopractice has included publication in nine editions of an introduction to humanistic psychology, The Mind Gymnasium. My therapeutic work settled on the creative margins of the psychotherapy mainstream, an orientation that  led, along with other concerned therapists, to a decade and a half of activism confronting the psychological therapies' love affair with the State. The challenges and research that this successful resistance entailed has led to two strands of continuing development; in 1995 I was a co-founder of the Independent Practitioners Network (IPN), a non-hierarchical, commons-structured way of delivering practitioner civic accountability. I continue to be supervised and accredited through the IPN process.

Along with two books about the vicissitudes of 'state regulation' Regulating the Psychological Therapies - From Taxonomy to Taxidermy and Therapy Futures: Obstacles and Opportunities, this active political experience has more recently nourished an understanding of the vernacular capability and resilience that enables us to meet human condition challenges; this awareness has taken the form of adding another commons to the list of classic commons of ocean, sky and forests; a 'psyCommons' – the ordinary wisdom and shared power threaded through daily life, and deriving from it, this psySavvy initiative.