Publications
This page outlines my publications. If you are interested in doing work together in one of these areas of research, or otherwise would like to know more about my work, feel free to reach out via email through the Contact Information page.
Hauser, Holt J.S. (2024). Person-centred Research Supervision: Facilitating Encounter with Researchers and Inquiry. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 00, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12791
Abstract: Drawing upon Schmid’s invitation to develop more congruent approaches to practice, training and research within the person-centred approach, this article explores the experiences of an early-career academic attempting to offer a facilitative research supervision relationships. Limitations of resources on research supervision in the counselling and psychotherapy field, as well as experiences of lacking training offered within the author’s academic milieu, are first explored. Inspired by collegial advice, the author outlines his own tentative framework to approaching the research supervision in alignment with person-centred concepts of being and learning in relationships. This rough model draws on Carl Rogers’ writing on person-centred learning, and Schmid’s articulations of encounter and presence as a positional approach to the Other. The author then presents two case studies generated through applying this model, before reflecting on themes arising in the research supervisory relationships as they relate to the proposed theory.
Hauser, Holt J.S. (2024). A Devil’s Bargain: Meeting Psychiatric Diagnosis in Person-Centred Therapy. The Person Centered Journal, 26 (1), 2-12. https://adpca.org/article/pcj-volume-26-2021-2023-full-edition/
Abstract: This article explores psychiatric diagnosis as it meets person-centred psychotherapeutic practice. Three short case vignettes are presented from the author’s practice that inspect how clients’ identification with a diagnosis played out in person-centred therapeutic work. Drawing on Rogers’ articulation of process in person-centred therapy and other discourses regarding psychiatric diagnosis, themes arising from these case vignettes are then examined. In particular, this discussion acknowledges competing tensions that clients identifying with psychiatric diagnosis can present in terms of congruence, self-responsibility, and understanding from others. The author ultimately concludes that such an identification with diagnosis can yield growth in clients as well as inhibit it, and must be worked with empathically in the psychotherapeutic relationship even if it may not align with person-centred conceptualisations of self and experiencing.
Hauser, Holt J.S. (2023) More than My Experience: an Argument for Critical Realism in Person-centred Psychotherapy. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2023.2295528
Abstract: In acknowledging psychotherapy as a space oriented toward philosophical exploration, this article embraces Schmid’s challenge for person-centered psychotherapists to develop philosophy more congruent with the practice of the person-centered approach. Inspired by practitioners from other approaches, the author challenges the dominant interpretive-phenomenological foundations of recent person-centered conceptual developments, tentatively arguing the case for a critical realism as an alternate onto-epistemic framing for person-centered psychotherapy. The author acknowledges weaknesses of interpretive phenomenology in relation to the person-centered approach, particularly the challenges it presents for dialogue, development and decision-making in terms of theory, research and practice. These challenges are highlighted in reference to Rogers’ conceptualization of a ‘New Integration’ of science and experience put forth in On Becoming a Person. An abridged explanation of critical realism is offered before considering critical realism’s application to the person-centered approach. The author demonstrates critical realism’s use in formulating congruence theoretically, providing robust frameworks for research that can generate knowledge without assuming the role of expert, allowing critical reflexivity on socio-cultural contexts of theory, and offering holding, developmental frameworks for practitioners and trainees.
Hauser, Holt J.S. (2022). ‘Pulling the Bandage Off’: Using Margaret Warner’s ‘Fragile Process’ in the Psychodynamic Approach. British Journal of Psychotherapy. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjp.12745
Abstract: This article explores the nature of how therapists work with clients who find it difficult or impossible to be emotionally or relationally present in therapy. In trying to explore how to be with clients in this challenging state, the author draws from person-centred theorist Margaret Warner’s concept of ‘Fragile process’, and how it describes the presentation of these clients and the therapists’ role with them. The author then argues for the utility of this person-centred concept and its applicability in the psychodynamic approach, and wonders how it might be theoretically conceived in psychodynamic terms for use by psychodynamic practitioners. The author draws parallel between Warner’s idea of fragile process with fundamental theoretical understandings of the infant-mother relationship from the theories of Donald Winnicott. After exploring a theoretical understanding of this concept, the author explores his own clinical experience of a client exhibiting fragile process, inspecting a single session. The author offers his account on the case study’s contents, the transference material, and the practitioner’s reflective process to demonstrate how fragile process as a concept might be applied in client work.
Bittinger, R., Clarke, D. A. G., Erb, J., Hauser, H., & Wyatt, J. (2021). Intimacy as Inquiry: Collaborative Reading and Writing With Deleuze and Guattari. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 21(6), 480–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086211037761 .
Abstract: This article performs the becoming intimacy of a reading (and, later, writing) group who met once a month for 2 years to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through this collaborative piece, we explore the question of intimacy as both a form of activism and a mode of inquiry. We ask, “Where is activism as we subvert the hierarchy of academia by meeting as an assemblage of differing perspectives and positions in the university?” Furthermore, we ask, “What does the intimacy that occurred, that is occurring, do for both inquiry and activism?.” This article contains two sets of writing from our monthly meetings that we offered as performative conference texts. We contend that it is affect that brings our theorizing to life, and transfers it meaningfully between each other. We are affected by Deleuze and Guattari, by A Thousand Plateaus, and by how we form linkages with our lives to these bodies. Intimacy is what sustains and gives life to our collective inquiry, without which our affect might be more constrained. The complexity of the becoming of “intimacy as inquiry” becomes twofold, as it is not only a becoming of intimacy, love, and care for those in our assemblage but also a reterritorialization of the act of inquiry. Through the act of disrupting power structures in the group of “We 5,” the act of writing and presenting this work in an academic context pushes against the striated spaces that exist in the academy, that course through the milieu we occupy, and provides the means and necessity for reterritorializing the epistemic space. “Epistemic intimacy,” then, becomes a manifestation of engaging with the inquiry process and embodies an active resistance to the business transaction that the act of inquiry has become in the neoliberal development of the academy.
Hauser, Holt J.S. (2020). Cardstock and Containment: Exploring Therapeutic Affect in Magic: the Gathering for Adults [Doctoral Thesis, University of Edinburgh]. Edinburgh Research Archive. https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/37082.
Abstract: The field of mental health and gaming has grown with the surge of the digital gaming industry in the last thirty years. While research on video games in regard to mental health, especially their effects on children, concerns about pathological use, and potential applications health interventions, is becoming a known field of study, there are many more avenues for approaching games that have yet to be explored. There are three nexuses in which research into games and their relationship with mental health are underrepresented: 1. Qualitative, experience-focused research; 2. Research focusing on adult populations; and 3. Research on traditional games. Where these three nexuses meet, there is an absolute dearth of research. Given substantial previous work into the impact of games on human culture and society, and promising results from other populations and types of games, this thesis considers whether this might be a worthwhile subject area for future mental health research to expand on.
With this epistemic gap in mind, this thesis uses an ethnographic approach grounded in social realism to provide a foundational inquiry into whether traditional games can be considered therapeutic for adults. The hope for this research is that its results may be applicable and usable by further academic work from a wide breadth of different disciplines and onto-epistemic approaches. Using the game Magic: The Gathering as a case study, this work analyses the digital artefacts and experiential accounts offered by players, the design elements that are worked into the game, as well as the personal experiences and insights of the author as a Magic player, therapist and researcher. By marrying observations and experiences from the ludic field of Magic: The Gathering with theories from counselling and psychotherapy, the author outlines a process by which we might determine whether an activity is therapeutic. By applying this definition to narratives and outcomes offered by players online, this research concludes that traditional games can be therapeutic for adults, and further inquiry is needed to fully understand what impacts and potential benefits traditional games could have on the field of mental health for adults.
With this conclusion in mind, this thesis also offers an understanding of how one might theorize or conceptualize the ways a game can be therapeutic. This thesis maps out a potential path through which therapeutic affect evident in outcomes may develop in relation to game-play interactions, through a process of working with culturally established boundaries and expression both in-game and in the community that constitutes a process of contained reality-testing. This process is also explored alongside the complex relationship and entanglement of wider social discourses and contexts that Magic is a part of, such as assumptions made about games as a whole as well as issues of difference and diversity in gaming. In doing so, this research offers a model of how mental health research into games can be applied at an experiential level, as well as creating a reference point for the potential further application of counselling and psychotherapeutic theories in game.