Inter-mission : an enactment of how art psychotherapy and narrative therapy shaped teamwork and therapeutic practice in a community-based counselling service for young people in Western Sydney

I wrote the short play or ethnographic drama (Richardson, 1997) that forms the centrepiece of this chapter from the edited transcripts of a videotaped conversation and email communications with members (workers, trainees and managers) of a counselling centre that is part of the Wesley Mission, one of Australia's largest non-government welfare organisations. The centre, which is located in an area of outer Western Sydney marked by significant social and economic disadvantage, works from a social justice and 'strengths-based' perspective with young people and their families. Over the three years prior to this conversation, the team had experimented with introducing some different approaches to working with young people, in particular, narrative therapy and art psychotherapy. This initiative was associated with an informal partnership between the counselling centre and the Master of Art Therapy at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) now Western Sydney University, with the centre offering placements to art therapists in training and employing several graduates of the course. The emphasis was not so much on taking up a narrative approach to art therapy (Freeman, Epston and Lebovits, 1997; Riley, 1999; Riley and Malchiodi, 2003; Hoshino and Cameron, 2008) as on seeing what emerged from bringing the different frameworks of art psychotherapy and narrative therapy into a particular context for therapeutic practice. Moreover, narrative therapy and art therapy were brought into the team's ways of conceptualising and exploring their relationships with each other. For reasons that I will explain later in the chapter, the cultural influence of these therapies upon and within the team, rather than the specifics of therapeutic work with young people, is the major focus of this chapter.