Publisher's Synopsis
This book is both a celebration and a critique of contemporary psychotherapy. Written from the perspective of a practising psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the NHS, it shows how psychoanalytical ideas can illuminate such clinical problems as disturbances of personal identity, adolescent loneliness, obsessionality, long-term mental illness, agoraphobia and suicide. The book emphasizes the importance of creativity in psychotherapy and the connections between the artistic and the psychotherapeutic impulse. The importance of psychotherapy as a humanizing force within psychiatry is discussed and the book describes the problems and possibilites created by setting up a psychotherapy service in a rural setting. Interwoven with these clinical and organizational issues is a theoretical discussion of the strengths and limitations of the psychoanalytical approach. Freud always considered psychoanalysis as science and, in the author's view, psychoanalysis is at its best a hybrid discipline combining the intuitive and the rational, the narrative with the experimental approach.
