Summary
Contents
‘It is surely worth reading, not only by the author's fellow psychiatrists, but also by psychologists in general’ — Contemporary Psychology. ’I found this book a joy to read. Each chapter sets out the orthodoxy in question, then proceeds to explain lucidly the author's difficulties with this orthodoxy and to suggest an alternative way of looking at the issues’ — Self and Society Psychotherapy's influence seems all pervasive today. But to what end? Is helping people really therapy's main mission? This provocative book explores the alternatives to psychotherapeutic orthodoxies on such vital issues as sexuality; the self; the unconscious; creativity; and the dilemma of evil. Erensto Spinelli challenges psychotherapy, asking if it has retreated from its early promise of being a pivotal agent in our attempts to discover what it means to be human, in exchange for its current role as a pacifier of personal and social unease.
Celebrating Mediocrity: What has Happened to Psychotherapy?
Celebrating Mediocrity: What has Happened to Psychotherapy?
A year or so ago, I read the following quote by Murray Kempton:
I cannot conceal the sense that those of my subjects who became communists were terribly flawed by their acceptance of a gospel which had no room in it for doubt, or pity, or mercy. And that clutching its standard, it was inevitable that so many would set out to become redeemers, and end up either policemen or the targets of policemen.1
Although Kempton was writing about the experiences of 1930s' communists in the United States, when I mentally exchanged the word ‘communists’ in the above passage with that of ‘psychotherapists’, I was immediately struck by how deeply and accurately the passage ...
