The book applies a unique mix of psychosocial methods to understand the complexity of emotional, cognitive and ideological responses to human rights violations and examines the banal quality of the everyday vocabularies that people use to make sense of human rights and their violations, and justify not intervening. In Passivity Generation, Irene Bruna Seu offers a vivid and compassionate account of how past experiences of trauma and suffering affect individual (un)responsiveness, and explores the psychodynamics of passivity and its underpinning defence mechanisms.

'If only people knew, they would do something.' Every day we see evidence that, when it comes to human rights violations, knowledge is not a guarantee for action. What stops people from doing more to protect human rights? What factors generate passivity or are we simply a passive generation? Passivity Generation addresses these important questions and reports on a series of studies exploring what happens to the knowledge related to human rights violations when it reaches the public. The book applies a unique mix of psychosocial methods to understand the complexity of emotional, cognitive and ideological responses to human rights violations and examines the banal quality of the everyday vocabularies that people use to make sense of human rights and their violations, and justify not intervening. In Passivity Generation, Irene Bruna Seu offers a vivid and compassionate account of how past experiences of trauma and suffering affect individual (un)responsiveness, and explores the psychodynamics of passivity and its underpinning defence mechanisms.

The central question that Seu and Heenan have posed to contributors to this book is to explore critically how their feminist beliefs, understandings and commitments inform their work as psychotherapeutic practitioners and researchers. What we are offered is a multiplicity of feminist and psychotherapeutic narratives... The book raises a very serious issue about the nature of the feminist project within psychotherapy... The editors and contributors have created a brave book which articulates the dilemmas of feminist thought and practice within the contexts of therapeutic engagement' - British Journal of Guidance and Counselling Challenging the notion that one model of therapy or one model of feminism can be privileged above others, this volume reflects on the complexities and multiple dimensions of theory and practice in contemporary feminist psychotherapies. Practitioners and researchers representing a broad cross-section of viewpoints critically consider their feminist therapeutic frameworks to address from within the practice the ways in which feminist therapy has set gender above and beyond other social inequalities. Drawing on case material from clinical practice, as well as research on feminism and psychotherapy, the authors demonstrate how the tensions inherent in different therapeutic models and feminist beliefs both question and reinforce popular notions of `gender' and `woman'.