The Psyche in the Modern World: Psychotherapy and Society (The United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy Series) - Softcover

'This book is an important endeavour.'- Susie Orbach, psychotherapist, psychoanalyst, writer, and social critic'Psychotherapy is often perceived as disconnected from the real world. In this book, psychotherapists from a variety of backgrounds and orientations build bridges between psyche and society, demonstrating the importance of psychotherapy to contemporary culture. The book provides a stimulus for discussion and reflection for those in practice or training.'- Professor Emmy van Deurzen, Principal of the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling'The authors make a significant contribution to the exploration of the interface between psychotherapeutic theory and the "world" both client and therapist bring to the therapy room. A world struggling to find meaning, perhaps even lost in transition between modern and postmodern paradigms. This book will disturb the strong and encourage the vulnerable. It is written not only for today but for the tomorrow of our grandchildren.'- Dr Ken Evans, Co-Director, European Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies; Visiting Professor of Psychotherapy, USEE; President, European Association for Integrative Psychotherapy'This is a courageous and inspiring book that raises urgent and important questions that will be of interest to every practitioner. The topics discussed include the social contexts for individual distress, how deeply we should engage in social and political matters, and what to do in difficult social circumstances or clinical cases. Such topics are rarely explicitly acknowledged or discussed, and the profession of psychotherapy requires considerable courage to consider these difficult subjects in order to help provide appropriate solutions in situations that we sometimes cannot deal with on our own. This book will be of great interest and benefit to patients and helpers alike.'- Associate Professor Eugenijus Laurinaitis, MD, PhD, President of the European Association for Psychotherapy'Tom Warnecke has assembled an intriguing series of essays exploring the historical, political, cultural, and conceptual minefield in which contemporary psychotherapeutic practice resides. It is a brave attempt to put the psyche back into psychological practice as an embodied, emotive, individual yet social centre of experience. This is an ambitious, exciting work that challenges many established preconceptions about the nature and limits of psychotherapy and raises unsettling questions, not only about the operation of power in our societies, but also our own responses to the legacies of injustice that appear in the consulting room. It is a book about community as much as it deals with professional practice. This is a very important book, which deserves to be read outside of psychotherapy as well as in it. The world we live in is a human one - co-created by all of us. The contributions to this collection suggest a different, more hopeful one is possible.'- Dr Ron Roberts, CPsychol, AFBPsS, Senior Lecturer, Department of Arts & Social Sciences, Kingston University, London

The Psyche in the Modern World sets out to open consulting room doors and bring the concept of the Psyche, and its main advocate, the psychotherapy discipline, into public space and into the realm of interdisciplinary discourse. A culture of carefully guarded clinical confidentialities inadvertently turned the consulting room into a proverbial ivory tower which has done much to obscure the psychotherapeutic body of knowledge and contributed to the myths and misinformation that surround and veil psychotherapy in the public space. This book redresses the balance and confronts some challenging, and sometimes uncomfortable, questions about the dichotomies that both characterize our relationships with the Psyche and contextualize the provision of psychotherapy services today. The contributors present contemporary discussion on a broad range of current subjects, encompassing socio-political as well as philosophical, theoretical and clinical dimensions, in an accessible manner.