“The Right Time for SF to Come Along” – R. D. Laing, Franco Basaglia and Working Utopias

Inspired by the zeitgeist

In a fascinating interview published recently in this journal (McKergow, 2024), a group of leading solution-focused practitioners from Finland mused about the arrival there of the solution-focused approach. They wondered whether the development of the approach was connected with and influenced by the social and political climate prevalent at the time. Ben Furman reported hearing a lecture by Insoo Kim Berg, a central figure in the original solution-focused developments at Milwaukee, in which she referred to:

“…the zeitgeist in the 1970s and 1980s; people wanted to change the world, they were politically active… wanting to make the world a better place. Stop the wars, stop the oppression of people, freedom! The family therapy movement was born, the MRI was born. SF is one of the results of this trend. Insoo said they were also inspired in Milwaukee by what was happening at that time.” (McKergow, 2024, p. 5)

The 1970s and 1980s were certainly a time of creative ferment for Insoo and her colleagues in Milwaukee, the latter of those two decades in particular, but the zeitgeist referred to surely dates back to the 1960s. A candidate for the birth of the family therapy movement is the first appearance of the journal Family Process in 1962, while the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, California, was founded at the end of the 1950s, and its influential Brief Therapy Center began work in 1966. The political action of the people wanting to change the world presumably includes the Civil Rights Movement, which fought for race equality and voting rights, and global opposition to the Vietnam War, reaching its climax in the student protests of 1968.

Riitta Malkamäki, another of the Finnish interviewees, said:

“Before SF came, the revolutionary thinking of Franco Basaglia (1924-1980) was popular; it was very different thinking, it changed the whole psychiatric world. And the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest [the film was released in 1975, Ken Kesey’s novel having been published in 1962], there was a lot of deinstitutionalisation, walls were coming down, and it was the right time for SF to come along. The atmosphere was right for SF to come along.” (McKergow, 2024, p. 4)

Franco Basaglia was a psychiatrist in Italy whose name and work is not well known in Anglophone countries, as most of his writing has not been translated into English (Foot, 2023). Riitta, who speaks Italian as well as Finnish and English, referred to Basaglia’s influential 1968 book, L’istituzione negata: Rapporto da un ospedale psichiatrico (The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital). When Basaglia took up his first psychiatric hospital post, in Gorizia in 1961, he immediately began to eradicate such abusive practices as binding patients to their beds, and he was the principal proponent of the 1978 law that abolished mental hospitals in Italy. A psychiatrist who had a similar impact, not mentioned by the Finnish interviewees but more well-known in Anglophone countries, was R. D. Laing, another charismatic and radical psychiatrist who came to the fore in the 1960s when he also challenged traditional psychiatric methods. With colleagues in the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement, Laing founded the Philadelphia Association, whose first and most prominent therapeutic community, Kingsley Hall in London’s East End, ran from 1965 to 1970 (Chapman, 2021).

The thoughts expressed by the Finnish practitioners resonated with some of my own, and I remembered an interview I had some years ago with Caroline Klingenstierna (Solution Focused News, 2015). I talked about how I came to be a solution-focused practitioner, which took me back to experiences before training as a social worker in the 1980s:

I also worked in a mental health day centre, that was actually also very influential, now I think about it, on what I ended up doing with solution focus. Because, going back before the social work course, I spent a year working in a mental health day centre run by an organisation called MIND, a UK mental health charity, and the day centre I worked in in Liverpool, and some of the staff that ran the centre, were quite radical in some ways. I came across some radical ideas of service user involvement and service user control of services. I was reading books by people like Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing, and people like this, so I had this idea, and there was a magazine called Asylum, a magazine for democratic psychiatry, which fitted with these ideas of service user or survivor input and control and having democratic services, so I was fascinated by mental health as a field to work in.

Renewal

Listening to this again after reading the Finnish interview, I was struck by the similarity in how Riitta and I connected radical ideas in mental health to solution-focused practice. In her interview, Riitta went on to ask, ‘What happened to that revolutionary thinking? The biological approach took over’. However, I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to psychiatry or solution-focused practice, so I contacted her to clarify. During our conversation, Riitta told me that when solution-focused practice first came to Finland, ‘There was revolution and energy! We need to renew SF’s spirit!’ I wholeheartedly agreed, and this led me to write this article.

Objectives

One of my motivations is to join with like-minded others to enrich this spirit and thinking in solution-focused practice. As solution-focused practitioners know, words make a difference; reading those particular words by Riitta and her colleagues in their JSFP interview, I already felt some of that spirit being renewed. On one level, I simply wish to continue the conversation begun in that interview – to amplify, add to, and explore such a perspective. One means by which I will do so is to explore the connections Riitta and I perceived between the solution-focused approach and the radical mental health practices of Laing and Basaglia, connections that I think are worth carefully examining. I will then introduce the notion of ‘working utopias’, devised by the sociologist Nick Crossley (1999b). Crossley illustrated this concept with the examples of Laing’s Kingsley Hall and Basaglia’s progressive community services that replaced the traditional asylum in Trieste. I will suggest that viewing the solution-focused approach as a working utopia offers a promising lens for its development, before ending with a discussion of other future possibilities.

R. D. Laing and Kingsley Hall

Ronald David Laing was born in 1927 in Glasgow, where he studied medicine and developed his interest in psychiatry. It was while doing national service as a doctor in the British Army that he began to question psychiatry’s physical methods. He also read widely in philosophy and was especially influenced by the existentialists. His very first publication, in Glasgow Medical School’s newspaper, Surgo, was on philosophy and medicine. Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, there are other hints of the ‘anti-psychiatric’ direction Laing would later take. One early sign occurred while he was working as a young psychiatrist at Glasgow’s Gartnavel Royal Hospital, where he instigated a novel therapeutic project. He placed socially isolated, long-term patients from a ‘refractory ward’ in a more pleasant environment with the same two nurses each day, enabling them to develop more natural interactions and become more social (Cameron et al., 1955).

The Divided Self

Laing moved to London to train as a psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Clinic, and his first book, The Divided Self, was published in 1960 (Laing, 1960). Initially, it did not sell in large numbers. Though he was sharing new ways of understanding and working with people in mental distress, Laing was still perceived – and saw himself – as writing within psychiatry rather than mounting a wholesale challenge to it. This began to change as he questioned the dominant genetic theories of schizophrenia of the time, turning his attention to the nexus of ideas that situated its aetiology within problematic family communication (Bateson et al., 1956). Unsuccessful in having his ideas about this published in psychiatric journals, Laing found a more receptive home in those of progressive politics and social sciences, such as New Left Review and New Society. This provided a gateway into the gathering counterculture of the 1960s, the milieu in which Kingsley Hall was to exist. The Divided Self was reissued in 1965 (Laing, 1965), with a new preface in which Laing critiqued the distance he had placed between himself as a psychiatrist and his patients, and became a best seller.

Alec Jenner, a professor of psychiatry at Sheffield University during my social work training there, occupies a central place in this narrative, extending far beyond his mental health lectures that I attended. In 1986, he co-founded Asylum: A Magazine for Democratic Psychiatry – which I mentioned in my interview with Caroline Klingenstierna – and was arguably more responsible than anyone for introducing Franco Basaglia’s work into the UK. Interviewed by the sociologist, Nick Crossley, Jenner recalled being very impressed by Laing:

Because a lot of the patients had read it [The Divided Self] and I think that most of the psychiatrists were telling them not to and I was impressed by them saying “he understands me, you don’t”. The patients liked him. (Crossley, 1998, p. 879)

The book’s existentialist philosophical trappings might have been off-putting for some, but as Clancy Sigal, the American novelist and sometime resident at Kingsley Hall, said:

For all its Sartrean chatter – ontological insecurity, being-for-itself, etc – Laing’s message was starkly simple: doctors must stop treating mental patients as objects to be done things to, and have the courage to meet patients as equals in an “I-thou encounter”. (Sigal, 2005)

Reading The Divided Self now as a solution-focused practitioner, it can be difficult to appreciate how radically different Laing’s approach was from mainstream psychiatry at that time, particularly in working with the patient as a person and not an organism. This involved listening to and trying to understand the content of what the person was saying. For Laing, as for solution-focused practitioners, ‘The other as a person is seen by me as responsible, as capable of choice, in short, as a self-acting agent’ (1965, p. 22). While Laing’s ideas may have become too radical for mainstream psychiatry and other mental health professionals, his way of communicating with patients was influential. Anthony Clare, a psychiatrist who appeared frequently in the British media, wrote of the immense impact The Divided Self had on him, noting that Laing had ‘influenced a whole generation of young men and women in their choice of psychiatry as a career’ (1992, p. 204). And Clancy Sigal reported that a retired psychiatrist told him:

I was a trainee at the Maudsley [a London psychiatric hospital and the UK’s largest mental health training institution] in the 1960s and I think [Laing] influenced many [other trainees] to feel closer to patients and to interact more normally with them, rather than in the stilted or ‘clinical’ way that both psychiatry and psychoanalysis promoted at the time. (Sigal, 2005)

Kingsley Hall

It is worth reading the whole of Sigal’s article for his entertaining and ultimately sympathetic account of Kingsley Hall, where he was resident for a short but incident-packed period. Laing had set up the Philadelphia Association with like-minded (anti-)psychiatrists, David Cooper, Aaron Esterman and Joseph Berke, social worker, Sid Briskin, and Clancy Sigal, among others, to challenge traditional psychiatric concepts. They did that in part by setting up residential communities where people experiencing mental distress were offered a safe space to heal without the use of drugs or physical treatments. Kingsley Hall, a neighbourhood centre in London’s East End, where Gandhi stayed for 12 weeks in 1931, housed the first such experiment. Laing hoped this community would validate his view of madness not as a breakdown, but as a breakthrough into a more authentic existence than the normal state of alienation to which most of us succumb (Laing, 1967).

Connecting not assessing

While Laing’s thesis might appear distant from solution-focused practice, his metaphor of a journey connects with how I, as a solution-focused practitioner, view clients moving toward their hopes. In addition, the absence of psychiatric diagnoses at Kingsley Hall (Chapman, 2021) and a persistent focus on the choices of the ‘patient’ – the term placed in quotes given the blurring of boundaries between ‘staff’ and ‘patients’ at Kingsley Hall – are surely directly relevant. An oft-recounted story of an incident from Laing’s 1972 US lecture tour provides a striking insight into both his approach to diagnosis and his way of communicating with patients. The story is related in a moving way in the 2017 film, Mad to Be Normal, and that this dramatised version introduces fictional elements to an actual incident is secondary, because the important factor when considering Laing’s work as an inspiration to others is its imaginative pull – a quality that will later be discussed as a central element of working utopias.

Laing was told about Sarah, a ‘schizophrenic’ in a padded cell: ‘who hadn’t spoken for 18 months, she doesn’t eat, so we force feed her and of course she’s violent’. Laing asked if he could see her, and the psychiatrist replied: ‘Of course. It will be interesting to hear your assessment’. Laing entered the cell and sat on the floor next to Sarah. Noticing she was barefooted, he took off his shoes and socks. Sarah took off her trousers, so Laing took off his. He offered her a cigarette, rocked as she was rocking, and asked if she would like to chat. He empathised with how difficult it was in the cell – ‘the light gives you a headache’ – and performed a little acupressure on Sarah’s face and feet. He asked if she was hungry and if she would like a pizza. When she appeared to indicate she would, Laing asked, ‘Should we send out for some?’ and went to the door to ‘order’ them. He asked Sarah what she’d like, pepperoni or mushroom, and her reply of ‘pepperoni’ was the first time she had spoken in several months. They left the cell after eating, and Laing thanked Sarah and said goodbye.

The subsequent exchange between the American psychiatrist and Laing can be read as a representation of the psychiatric establishment’s general response to his work. After being accused of behaving in a highly unprofessional manner, Laing replied that it was the psychiatrist’s job to understand what the patient was trying to say, not the patient’s job to try to understand why he was filling her full of tranquillisers and locking her away. The psychiatrist began to interrupt Laing, who said he was not finished. ‘I think you are,’ the psychiatrist replied. As I see it, the most striking aspect of Laing’s encounter with Sarah is that he did not do what the psychiatrist was interested in – an assessment. Instead, he connected with her on a human level, remaining interested, though seemingly not invested, in her preferences regarding his suggestions, culminating in the pizza. Perhaps I am drawn to this distinction precisely because I am a solution-focused practitioner; though it is just as likely that it was my early exposure to Laing’s work that primed me to embrace solution-focused practice in the first place.

Choices and preferences

The absence of assessment and diagnosis at Kingsley Hall was accompanied by a lack of any formally structured therapeutic arrangements, other than a prioritising of the patient’s choices and preferences. This is illustrated in Mad to Be Normal when John’s parents, worried that he hears voices but distressed by his previous electroconvulsive therapy, seek out Kingsley Hall. Upon their arrival, Laing struggles to engage with John, leading to the following dialogue:

Laing: According to Dr Meredith, you’re a catatonic schizophrenic. John, could you at least tell me what you want?

John: I want my own room.

Laing: And what might you do in there?

John: [sits in silence]

Laing: John, we’ll be able to give you a room, although here we call them cells, from the Latin cella, so, a small room, where a nun or a monk sleeps… and we’ll take it from there. Does that sound okay?

John: Yeah.

John’s mother: So, how will you treat him?

Laing: Well, we’ll give him what he wants, we’ll give him a cell, erm, and if he wants to talk, we’ll listen.

John’s mother: And that’s it?

Laing: Yeah.

The focus on what the person wants is evident too in one of the most compelling accounts of Kingsley Hall, on Mary Barnes’s ‘journey through madness’. This was co-authored by Barnes, a Kingsley Hall resident, and Joseph Berke, a psychiatrist and one of the members of the Philadelphia Association who was also resident at the Hall (Barnes & Berke, 1982). It includes a passage in which Barnes reflects on her contradictory impulses – both desiring food and refusing it from her carers – and questions whether not eating meant ‘going against’ her treatment or going against her own wishes and interests. She concluded that: ‘Therapy treatment, then, was coming to know what I wanted’ (1982, p. 182). There are unmistakable echoes here of Milton Erickson’s definition of therapy, passed from John Weakland to Steve de Shazer: that therapy is simply ‘two people talking together trying to figure out what the hell one of them wants’ (de Shazer, 1999, p. 35). For his part, Berke reports that when Mary solicited advice from him, he would say, ‘Mary, you know I am not you. What do you want?’ (Barnes & Berke, 1982, p. 360). Mary, who hoped her brother, Peter, would benefit from Kingsley Hall as she had, records how she learned from Berke and Laing that she could not force him to stay longer than he wished. Consequently, she was able to let go of her intense desire for Peter to receive therapy. Peter did come to stay at Kingsley Hall, where he decided for himself how to make use of the help available there.

Franco Basaglia and Trieste

Born in 1924, three years before Laing, Franco Basaglia was actively anti-fascist during World War II. He was present in the prison uprising in April 1945 that led to the ending of the Nazi occupation of Venice, an experience that was to influence his later comparisons of mental hospitals with prisons (Fioritti et al., 2025). Basaglia was more concerned than Laing with the reform of public mental health services, expressing his critique of institutional psychiatry at a more social and political level. However, Basaglia recognised his connection with Laing, while highlighting their differences: 'Laing’s theory and practice tend to focus and concentrate on individual subjective change; instead we tend to concentrate on social transformation, while keeping in mind other levels of the problems… [but] these two aspects, the subjective and the social, are two sides of a single reality" (Basaglia & Ongaro Basaglia, 1987, p. 194; emphasis added).

Bracketing as problem-free talk

Like Laing, Basaglia was steeped in philosophy, and the influence of the phenomenologist Husserl was evident while he was director of Gorizia Hospital in the 1960s. He adapted Husserl’s concept of ‘bracketing’ (1913/2012) – the suspension of preconceived notions and assumptions about the world to focus on direct experience – for his approach to working with mental patients. This becomes clear in the text Riitta referred to, The Negated Institution. What Basaglia meant by ‘bracketing the illness’ can be seen as a version of problem-free talk, appearing more than 20 years before solution-focused practitioners (George et al., 1990) coined that term:

It is not that we put the illness aside, but rather that we believe that in order to have a relationship with an individual, it is necessary to establish it independent of the label by which the person has been defined. I have a relationship with someone not because of the diagnosis, but because of who she is. In the moment that I say, “this person is a schizophrenic” (with all that this implies for cultural reasons) I will begin to behave toward her in a unique way, that is, knowing full well that schizophrenia implies an illness for which nothing can be done. My relationship will be that of someone who only expects “schizophrenicity” from the individual. We can see how, in this way, the old psychiatry discarded, imprisoned, and excluded the sick person for whom it was believed there existed no recourse, no tools for treatment. This is why it is so very necessary to draw closer to her, bracketing the illness, because the diagnostic label has taken on the weight of a moral judgment that passes for the reality of the illness itself. (Basaglia, 1968, as cited in Lovell & Scheper-Hughes, 1987, p. 8)

This was not an easy task, however: ‘Suspending the most general labels— psychotic, alcoholic, depressive – was difficult, for the trained clinician was then left without any other language’ (Lovell & Scheper-Hughes, 1987, p. 8). What clinicians needed was to develop a capacity to focus on and use the language of the patients.

Democratising the asylums

John Foot, a specialist in Italian history, has written an extensive account of the work of Basaglia, his colleagues, and the Psichiatria Democratica movement (Foot, 2023). This has been described by Helen Spandler as ‘an indispensable resource for a UK readership’, given the lack of accounts in English of Basaglia’s work (2016, p. 439). However, Foot writes as a historian rather than from a mental health perspective, which is occasionally frustrating. Although The Negated Institution is sometimes called the ‘Bible of 1968’ (Foot, 2023, p. 171) because it reflects the political counterculture of that pivotal year, Foot shares little of its radical content, focusing instead, for example, on how Basaglia managed to publish it. His text comes to life, however, when describing the daily patient meetings Basaglia instigated at Gorizia, which became typical of those at other hospitals run by ‘Basaglians’.

Patients who had been locked up, some tied to their beds, now sat in meetings, and these ‘assemblies of Franco Basaglia’s “mad” patients were the most moving and most powerful demonstrations of democracy [in the 1960s] and its regenerative power’ (Anna Bravo, as cited in Foot, 2023, p. 145). Beginning in 1965, general meetings took place each morning and could be attended by anybody in the hospital: doctors, nurses, patients, and also visitors from outside – patients’ families, even activists, journalists and students. At first, the meetings ‘were often marked by pandemonium, or by long uncomfortable silences’ (Foot, 2023, p. 146), but they developed in a remarkable way. A journalist, Franco Pierini, visited Gorizia in 1967, and was struck by how patients discussed matters of concern, such as why Ward D had not been on an outing for a long time, or why a group of women opposed the dining room moving into their workroom. ‘It would be wrong… to report that these men and women talk like us and can argue like us. They do it better. Their way of discussing things, their dialectic of opposing views, their skill in reaching conclusions without scapegoating or making anyone feel defeated, is superior to ours’ (as cited in Foot, 2023, p. 147, emphasis in original).

Closing the mental hospitals

These meetings gave the patients a voice and constituted direct democracy in action. Basaglia moved to the psychiatric hospital at Colorno, near Parma, and instigated the same practices there, leading his psychiatric protégé, Franco Rotelli, to comment: ‘It was beautiful to have democracy for breakfast… It started to seem so to them as well, the mad, that… (a) day that started in such a way had some sort of meaning’ (as cited in Foot, 2023, p. 282). However, by this time, Basaglia had taken the view that the asylum setting itself impeded the therapeutic and revolutionary impact of this process. Recognizing that context matters, he increasingly worked toward the total closure of mental hospitals, an effort that accelerated after his move to Trieste in 1971 and his co-founding of the Psichiatria Democratica movement in 1973.

Backed by his experiences at Gorizia and Colorno, the broadening movement, and local political support, Basaglia moved fast in Trieste. While implementing humane psychiatric practices, Basaglia and his team were clear about their plans to close Trieste’s Asylum San Giovanni. A crucial part of this process was the creation of alternatives, including patient-worker cooperatives and community housing, initially located inside the hospital itself. Its closure was announced in 1977, and the following year the famous Law 180 was passed, outlawing the construction of new mental hospitals in Italy and directing the eventual closure of all existing ones (Foot, 2014).

Humanising mental health services

Asylum San Giovanni became ‘a complex of apartments for ex patients, with art studios for everyone, space for theatres and cinema performances and a perpetual discussion of what more could be done to humanise mental health services’ (Alec Jenner, as cited in Spandler, 2020, p. 209; emphasis added by Spandler). The legacy of these reforms has continued. Reported by the World Health Organization in 2021 to be one of the best mental health systems in the world, Trieste has no locked doors anywhere, and one of the lowest rates of involuntary admissions in any high-income country (Sashidharan, 2022).

Trieste has also had an international impact, playing a significant role in radical mental health movements in the UK, most notably inspiring Asylum, the ‘magazine for democratic psychiatry’ established in 1986. Reflecting on Asylum’s first 30 years, Helen Spandler recounts that its initial aim was ‘to struggle towards achieving what we thought was the best of the system in Trieste in the late eighties’ (2020, p. 209). I found Asylum inspiring, as I had done reading R. D. Laing a few years earlier. All of this went into the pot from which I believe my attachment to solution-focused practice later grew, but the reasons why have become clearer to me as I have researched for this article. Alec Jenner, Asylum’s co-founder, died in 2014, and an appreciation of him published on the magazine’s website included his reflections on one of the turning points in his approach to psychiatry:

And so it struck me that another mistake I had originally made in psychiatry was to discuss psychopathology with the patients rather than to discuss life with them. I was always interested in what sort of hallucination they had, and whether it fitted in with Schneider’s classification, and things of that sort. But I didn’t bother with that with this particular [patient]. We talked about what he wanted to talk about. I also thought that the patient had as much right to an ego as a Professor of Psychiatry. Because the professional situation was such that my ego was being pumped up. Wherever I went everybody thought I was The Great Expert and the patients were the riff-raff… This patient did quite well. And it struck me that part of the success was due to there being a future for him, and because he began to see that the way he was playing his cards in the real society was mistaken. (Virden, 2014)

Working Utopias

Nick Crossley (1998, 1999a) undertook sociological research into anti-psychiatry and the mental health survivors movement (in the sense of survivors of the psychiatric system) as examples of New Social Movements (NSMs). These were seen as ‘new’ in contrast with the ‘old’ social movements that comprised class-based challenges to capitalist society, with the NSMs emerging from the 1960s onwards being ‘organized around gender, race, ethnicity, youth, sexuality, spirituality, countercultures, environmentalism, animal rights, pacifism, human rights, and the like’ (Buechler, 2022).

This was the context in which Crossley (1999b) introduced the notion of working utopias (WUs), and he considered Kingsley Hall and the Trieste reforms as examples of such utopias as he defined them. Seeing them as utopian in this way goes some way to explaining the impact they had on the zeitgeist described at the beginning of this paper, and on particular people who became involved with the solution-focused approach at various stages in its development, which is still continuing. I will summarise how Crossley (1999b) defines a working utopia and sets out some of its features, with reference to the examples of Laing and Basaglia.

Having alluded to a general understanding of utopias as being imaginative projections, Crossley suggests there are occasional instances when these achieve some degree of concrete realisation. He sees a working utopia (WU) as being a small-scale model, a prototype, of the change desired by a particular social movement, rather than being a full realisation of that change. The fact that they actually exist – are ‘working’ – imparts to them particular uses for the movement as well as a symbolic value. Interviewing activists in the anti-psychiatry and survivor wings of the radical mental health social movement, Crossley discovered the importance of Kingsley Hall and Trieste through the number of times his interviewees mentioned them. These were psychiatrists, mental health workers, patients and survivors, who were searching for alternatives to mainstream psychiatry which fitted their values and ideals. Kingsley Hall and Trieste presented such alternatives and became central to the activists’ political projects.

Crossley enumerated some of the positive functions played by WUs, beginning with their motivational effects, as they ‘boosted the imaginative force that allowed these activists to envisage the possibility of alternatives and thus provided them with the impetus to continue with their struggle’ (1999b, p. 815). Secondly, WUs played a pedagogic role, their educational function being ‘clearly important in relation to social movement formation and reproduction’ (p. 818). Their third function related to the second, as Kingsley Hall and Trieste only had something to teach because ‘they both were sites… of social experimentation and knowledge production’ (p. 819). Crossley refers to scientific experimentation here – could the utopias be replicated elsewhere, for example – but asserts that ‘WUs are, above all else, practical experiments in practice’ (p. 820, emphasis added). The fourth function is a networking one and relates to the WUs’ role as meeting places for movement actors, where debate and discussion can also lead to new ideas and practices (p. 822). ‘The significance of WUs… is that their elevated status in the movement imagination makes them “places to be” and they therefore tend to attract visitors with a common interest’ (p. 824).

Finally, central to Crossley’s definition of WUs is that they have both a symbolic and a concrete aspect: ‘They can only be sites of pedagogic action, experimentation and market places for ideas and social capital, for example, because they really do exist as concrete sites of embodied practice’. However, of equal importance is that they have ‘a powerful symbolic hold on the imagination of movement activists’ (p. 826).

Solution-focused practice and working utopias

So how might solution-focused practice connect with the working utopia concept? I believe there are two ways. First, the solution-focused approach shares some change mechanisms with those of WUs. Recall that a WU is a prototype of an overall change that is desired. A WU then bears a similar relationship to this overall desired change that an ‘instance’ bears to a client’s ‘best hopes’ from a piece of solution-focused work. In fact, the term ‘instance’ could be replaced by the term ‘prototype’ and solution-focused language still be retained, given that de Shazer wrote that the aim of solution-focused brief therapy is to describe exceptions ‘and prototypes or precursors of the solution that the client has overlooked’ (1991, p. 58). Another shared mechanism resides in the WU’s motivational function, whereby it provides the imaginative force that enables the envisaging of possible alternatives, a function also provided in solution-focused work by the eliciting of a preferred future. We might say, then, that solution-focused practice utilises utopian functions to effect change.

The second potential connection is of an entirely different kind. This is that the solution-focused approach can itself be seen as a working utopia. This may be a more tendentious claim, to the extent that it rests on the idea that the development of the solution-focused approach is part of a social movement. A more limited claim would be that the solution-focused approach has operated as a working utopia, for some people, that is, those of us for whom solution-focused practice has been part of a project towards social and political change. This group might include, given what has been written above, the Finnish practitioners interviewed for this journal, Insoo Kim Berg and myself. I am not referring here to a solution-focused practitioner bringing a political agenda into their work with an individual in the therapy room, but to the creation of the solution-focused approach itself – and its renewal – as being a political act. The social and political change sought is more equal, democratic and liberatory human relations, including those involved in the provision of help, with the solution-focused approach being a prototype of such relations.

Solution-focused practice meets Crossley’s dual WU definition of having an imaginative force and actually existing. Some of the WU functions, for example of pedagogic action and being a meeting place for ideas, might have resided more clearly in some of the institutions of the solution-focused world, such as the Brief Family Therapy Center of the originators in Milwaukee, or BRIEF in London, and also the annual conferences run by EBTA and later the SFBTA. So, being an approach to change, rather than a place, solution-focused practice does not map exactly onto the contours of a working utopia drawn by Crossley. However, an advantage of seeing it as a working utopia is that it suggests we treat solution-focused practice as a means rather than an end, and, being a prototype, as a developing process rather than a final product.

Open and unfinished

Crossley does not refer to Ernst Bloch, the ‘philosopher of hope’ (Eagleton, 2015), or his notion of concrete utopias, though working utopias resemble them closely. Bloch’s central thesis was that the world is unfinished, from which he developed an open and future-focused philosophy that finds traces of a better future in concrete utopias in the present (Bloch, 1986). Daniel Magalhães Goulart (2016), a Brazilian mental health activist who visited Trieste, wrote in Asylum in 2016: ‘As with any social and political movement, what is most important is not its history but … what is yet to be achieved’. And Basaglia had earlier cautioned that ideas that ‘acquired their birthright through a repudiation of a particular reality… should, as a safeguard against their becoming an element of oppression themselves, be constantly reverting to reality to reinvigorate the spirit of renewal that originally informed them’ (Basaglia, 1985, p. 42).

Discussion

Basaglia’s cautionary words suggest the need for a continuing renewal of our ideas and practices, rather than this being a one-off event. Just as I found in the interview with the Finnish practitioners a sense of renewal already developing, so I hope that the continuation of this conversation here will have a similar effect. If it does, and if there is a broader renewal of the spirit of solution-focused practice, what difference would that make? Viewing solution-focused practice as a working utopia provides one answer. One of the essential attributes of a working utopia is that it exerts an imaginative force on social movement activists, in this case practitioners seeking an approach that fits their values and ideals about how to work with people. Without renewal, such an imaginative force is likely to wane. Basaglia goes further in seeing renewal as a safeguard against our ideas ‘becoming an element of oppression themselves’.

It is likely that some practitioners seeking ethical ways of working do not see themselves as ‘activists’ in this respect. Laing and Basaglia clearly were, and there are lessons to be drawn from the development of their actual working practices, which can still have an imaginative pull now, including - especially? - on people coming across them for the first time. For example, they both paid attention to the contexts of their practices, Laing in developing the therapeutic community of Kingsley Hall, and Basaglia in his work initially to reform mental hospitals and later towards their abolition. It is instructive to set the comments about the meetings Basaglia instigated within the hospitals – the ‘most powerful demonstrations of democracy’ in the 1960s – alongside Basaglia’s realisation that this was not enough. The hospital settings in which these meetings took place meant that they could never enable the type of social relations being sought, ones free of oppression.

Considering the contexts in which we do our work would add another dimension to solution-focused practice. While we frequently, and usefully, microanalyse our conversations with our clients, ‘macroanalyses’ are less common. They could include questions about who we work with and where. Microanalyses of our conversations show that we deliberately avoid exploring the causes of a client’s difficulties. However, if our work consists routinely of conversations with individuals, are we inadvertently suggesting that problems reside within the person rather than within oppressive social structures? Another question concerns who does the work. My own phrase above - ‘who we work with’ - reflects an ‘us and them’ separation, which mirrors Laing’s self critique in The Divided Self. Alternatives to professionalised help include solution-focused skills being used in mutual aid groups (Cohen & Graybeal, 2007), user-run mental health services (Ghul & Kilbey, 2025), and by non-‘professional’ workers and active citizens (Gardiner, in press).

Exploring Laing and Basaglia’s work does of course mean looking back to a different era. Insoo said they were inspired in Milwaukee by what was happening at that time of political action – who and what could similarly inspire today? There may not be the same zeitgeist as in the 1960s, but there are still people wanting to change the world: anti-war protestors, Black Lives Matter, the climate justice movement, intersectional feminism, groups countering the far right, and many others. Closer to the sphere in which solution-focused practice operates, there are critical psychiatry and mad studies, the disability justice movement, various abolitionist groups, and others. How solution-focused practice could relate to such social and political movements is an open question. I suggest that, to reinvigorate its original spirit of renewal, we utilise Ernst Bloch’s central idea and see solution-focused practice as open and unfinished. And just as we can be inspired by those striving to change the world around us, so, as a working utopia, we can continue to transmit an imaginative force of our own.

Conversation starting questions

The author and the editor of JSFP would like to start a conversation around the issues raised in this paper. Here are some starter questions to get you thinking:

• Seeing SF practice as a working utopia means seeing it as part of something bigger. What do you think of the idea of seeing solution-focused practice as part of or connected to a wider movement?

• Assuming it is the case that the 1960s zeitgeist - its counterculture, protest, and political/collective action to change the world - inspired the team in Milwaukee, as Insoo was reported as saying - what is happening in the world in the late 2020s that might inspire a renewal of SF’s spirit?

• Are there radical individuals in our current era (or any other types of individual) who SF could usefully connect with?

Please send in your responses to the journal at journalsfp@gmail.com. We hope to publish the replies later in the year.

Note

I would like to thank Mark McKergow, Riitta Malkamäki, and the peer reviewers for their assistance in the writing of this article.