OUR BACKGROUND
Joe Friedman and Marie-Laure Davenport, the founders of healingconversation, trained together at the Philadelphia Association. The PA, founded by R.D. Laing, one of their teachers, is different from many therapy organisations in that it emphasizes that no “ism” including psychoanalysis, has the whole truth. Rather, their teachers came from a variety of psychoanalytic, phenomenological and spiritual traditions. Their course emphasized the uniqueness of individual experience and ways of learning and warned against a “one size fits all” approach.
The PA is also different in that it provides a distinctive form of therapeutic community, in which individuals with mental and emotional problems live together in an ordinary household, visited regularly by a team of therapists.
Joe and Marie-Laure worked in one of the most successful of these communities for over fifteen years and thus have experienced (and feel comfortable with) a much wider range of mental distress than that normally encountered in private practice. In 2005, Dr. Raj Persaud featured this community in Radio 4’s All in the Mind. Joe's interview with him can be heard at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/allinthemind_20051206.shtml
It was the desire to continue to work together, and to apply what they had learned through this work, that led them to start healingconversation.