'My mother in law swallowed me whole': magical realism as a research paradigm that stretches beyond a psychological knowledge basis for counselling and psychotherapy research

Keywords: magical-realism, post-psychological knowledge, 'real-life' research, beyond regulation, critical thinking Despite the arts-based origins of many UK counselling and psychotherapy professionals (McLeod, 2001 and Speedy, 2007 both cite the anthropological, theological, historical, political, literary and arts-based backgrounds of many counsellors and psychotherapists) counselling research, and indeed, the tone of this conference, continues to be dominated by the social sciences, specifically the 'psychological' as a knowledge base. In this paper I argue that the counselling profession in this post-modern and post-psychological era would benefit not only from maintaining its arts-informed practices and but also extending them into ways of critically researching itself. I use extensive, detailed narrative data from my own research with counselling clients and students, to advocate magical realism as a surprising, subversive research paradigm that shifts and challenges commonly held understandings about fact, fiction and fantasy within therapeutic conversations and within concomitant research traditions. I plot shifts in my own understanding of the work that I do, both as a researcher and a practitioner, in light of the new vantage point of the constantly and seamlessly shifting lenses afforded by magical realism. I suggest that magical realism, an art form emerging from the margins and borders of the 'developed' world, might provide a particular resonance with the positions and life spaces inhabited by clients entering therapeutic relationships. I also suggest that arts-based lenses provide a multiplicity of ways of seeing, and therefore knowing, the worlds that we and our clients inhabit that are positioned very differently from 'psychological' forms of knowledge. Perhaps the counselling profession would gain from making better use of this complex and 'wild profusion' (Lather, 2006) of research methodologies, if it is to see its way beyond the next horizon of 'regulation' towards becoming a more critical, influential and self-regulating profession.