This book reflects the author's involvement and preoccupation with the growth and diversification of counselling and psychotherapy, with the imperatives of training, supervision and regulation, and with the significant changes in the profession due to the invention of brief, time-limited, intermittent and recurrent psychotherapy. An overall theme is the conviction that what patients and therapists share is vulnerability, and that the therapist is a 'wounded healer', whose reparative tendency informs his professional choice, his therapeutic empathy and his capacity to bear the rigours of therapeutic work . Thus an unconscious connection between the helper and the helped is the driving force of every therapeutic relationship, for better and for worse. Its responsible management requires thorough training, ongoing supervision and a firm frame in order to contain the powerful forces operating in the meeting of two strangers for the purpose of therapy. --- from the publisher Part of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy Series Contents: Introduction MODELS AND METHODS 1) Beginnings, Endings, and Outcome. A Comparison of Methods and Goals 2) From Free Association to the Dynamic Focus: Towards a Model of Recurrent Psychotherapy 3) In Praise of Once-weekly Work: Making a Virtue of Necessity or Treatment of Choice 4) Dilemmas in Brief Therapy 5) Suitability and Context for Brief Therapy 6) Bereavement Counselling 7) The Selection of Candidates for Training in Psychotherapy and Counselling CLINICAL AND OTHER MATTERS 7) The Stifled Cry or Truby King, The Forgotten Prophet 8) Some Thoughts on Sibling Rivalry and Competitiveness 10) The Absent Father and his Return: Echoes of War 11) Fatherhood Today: Variations on a Theme 12) Abuse and Recovery 13) Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ or Defiant Resistance in the Service of the Impoverished Self 14) The Burden of Being German 15) The Fear of Death About the Author: Gertrud Mander originally worked as a journalist and translator, before retraining as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation in London, where she was as a supervisor and trainer of supervisors for twenty three years. She has published widely in the field, mostly in the British Journal of Psychotherapy, where she is a member of the Editorial Board, and the book 'A Psychodynamic Approach to Brief Therapy'. This book is a collection of essays written over two decades and reflects her wide interests in the field of psychotherapy and counselling. |