Moral Singularity... (14.1.26)

 

Moral Singularity... (14.1.26)

Happy New Year to all.

I’m writing a post here to announce an upcoming book I’ve written. If not here, where?

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I write candidly and openly. And as anyone who has had therapy with me knows, it’s the voice I tend to use everywhere — with supervisees, colleagues, and clients alike: sometimes passionate, often tentative, a stubborn git, but open to being corrected and influenced by lived experience.

So I should say upfront that the book does not sound much like this blog. That’s deliberate.

Over the last months, I’ve written quite a lot here and elsewhere about the encroachment of activism into the therapy space — sometimes directly. I’ve tried over many years to stay open-minded, even when genuinely surprised or dismayed by the direction of travel within a profession I care deeply about.

Alongside this, I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens to therapy (and other spaces) when moral certainty, institutional pressure, and urgency begin to shape what can and can’t be said, explored, or even felt. In particular, how good intentions can start to operate as constraints on therapeutic freedom — and eventually on inner worlds.

Much of that thinking belonged in this blog register: personal, relational, reflective. It mattered to me to speak as a practitioner who is part of things rather than standing above them. That inevitably led to some sharp exchanges.

But over time, the same patterns kept reappearing — not just in therapy, but in supervision, training, professional bodies, and institutional conversations more broadly. And I found that when I tried to stay entirely within therapeutic language, something important kept slipping through my fingers.

What I was really noticing was a loss of space: space for uncertainty, hesitation, and half-formed ideas — the basic freedoms required to try to say something at all. Those freedoms are the basis of arriving at any truth.

So the book involved stepping back and describing the structure of morality in a different register from the language I normally use here — because the language here is designed for something else. Therapy language is relational by design. It works from within the room. Its focus is responsiveness, attunement, and repair.

In writing the book, it was important to clear that away. My intention was not (and is not) to shout from the rooftops or call people names. There’s no intentional culture-war component, though readers may recognise familiar shadows. What the book aims to do is neutrally describe a structure — without turning it into an argument, a diagnosis, or a call to action.

That’s where Moral Singularity came from.

Here’s a link to the reference page on my website.

In the book, I try to map — as carefully and neutrally as I can — how moral seriousness, urgency, and care can sometimes reorganise systems in ways that make ordinary correction stop working, even when everyone involved is sincere. Moral systems that reach a point where they effectively stop learning from empirical evidence.

It’s not written in a therapeutic voice. It’s not addressed to clients. And it doesn’t offer solutions. It’s as much moral-systems philosophy as it is psychology.

In some ways, it’s the least “me” thing I’ve written stylistically — and yet it grew directly out of the same ground as my clinical work. It began as notes, then a mind-map, then a very, very long table, as I tried to understand the escalation of commitment people maintain toward ideas that increasingly produce effects opposite to those intended.

I’ve put a reference page for the book on the site so it has a clear place to live and can be referred to properly if needed. I don’t expect it to be of interest to everyone who reads this blog — and that’s absolutely fine.

I’m thinking carefully about the route to publication. Timelines don’t sit easily with traditional publishing (which can take years even if smooth), and more importantly, there are questions of control over structure, tone, and timing that matter a great deal for a book like this.

Anyone familiar with contemporary publishing will recognise the pressure I mean: not censorship exactly, but a steady pull toward accessibility at the expense of exactness, positioning, and “helpfulness” — shaping work so that it fits an identifiable market.

I’m no longer convinced that model is healthy, or even viable, for certain kinds of serious work. Whatever route the book takes, preserving the integrity of the work itself matters more to me than any other perceived benefit.

More broadly, it seems we’re watching the slow unravelling of books and publishers as the primary units and gatekeepers of knowledge. The economics are wobbling, incentives are distorted, and the future likely looks less like selling books and more like licensing and use of ideas inside systems that care little about the original container. In that context, retaining control over the integrity of the work matters far more to me than accepting institutional backing, especially if it comes with the requirement to change or soften the book (which I think it will). I’m exploring this now.

I also want to be clear about this: nothing about the way I work has changed. This blog will continue in the same relational, exploratory spirit. If anything, this project grew out of a desire to protect the conditions that make reflective, relational work possible in the first place.

Sometimes language needs more than one shape to do its job. This is one of those times.

After devoting almost a couple of months entirely to the book, I need to catch up on other things — including health and admin. I’ll take a short break from writing and let it breathe.

I’ll keep the blog updated as the book moves through its editorial phase, but I promise I won’t drown you in it!