A Room in Chelsea: Quentin Crisp at Home
Quentin Crisp's 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant was adapted to considerable success in Jack Gold's 1975 television film, with John Hurt in the role. Crisp would identify himself as ‘bohemian’ as much as queer, and in his writings he traces a life in which London bedsits and rooming houses are home to those, like himself, whose wilful social otherness meant a rejection of domestic mores. Crisp's anarchic attitude towards domesticity and homemaking would become highly quotable, and the image of his Chelsea room enculturated as a quite singular provocation of ‘good’ domesticity. Crisp's room would correspond with cultural representations of the bedsit as a marker of liminal identity, and the media fascination to which it was subject reveals not only the political motivations of journalists often blind to the very rich life of The Naked Civil Servant, but also that they were oblivious to Crisp's performative tendencies and his own hyperbole about his room as a place of exile.
Domestic modernism, the interwar novel, and E.H. Young
Contents: Introduction: 'And what about the home?' The interwar domestic novel and the meaning of home Home lives, still lifes House haunting Private and public spheres: publication and reception The turn to domestic modernism Vicarages and lodging-houses Modern heroines of the everyday England, my England Conclusion Bibliography Index.
Preparing for group analytic psychotherapy: meeting the new patient
Preparing for group analytic psychotherapy—the patient and yourself as a therapist—is apparently done in many ways and still invested with much controversy and ambivalence. Some say, they do no selection or assessment at all. The patients or clients are taken from the waiting list in alphabetic order. Other therapists—mainly those working in National Health Services—use several assessment interviews before including patients into short- or long-term groups. Either way, this article revives some research results about assessment and hopes to inspire therapists in their first contact with the patient by presenting some examples from a clinical outpatient practice in a mental health service.