True and False Experience: Human Element in Psychotherapy / Edition 1

by Peter Lomas

Overview

Is psychotherapy first and foremost a technique that can be described, learned, and practices, or is it a relationship in which techniques play a part but ordinary human qualities are the crucial factors? True and False Experience discusses those factors that have made it difficult for therapists and patients to meet as equals in a natural and ordinary way, keeping them from establishing a genuine relationship with each other.

Lomas acknowledges Freud as the most valuable and influential theorist of psychoanalysis, but he also questions the consequences of his detached and scientific methods. Lomas also critiques psychotherapeutic theory since Freud, examining the work of the main contributors to the field, including R. D. Laing, Erik Erikson, Melanie Klein, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers. As an alternative, Lomas recreates relations between himself and some of his patients in order to demonstrate how therapy can develop into a straightforward and personal contact between therapist and patient.

In a new introduction, Lomas analyzes the changes that have occurred in society over the past twenty years and rethinks his work in a historical perspective. True and False Experience is an essential and stimulating resource for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, counselors, and social workers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560007333
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/30/1994
Series:	History of Ideas Series
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Peter Lomas has worked in general practice, neurosurgery, and psychiatry before training at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. Since that time he has practiced in child and family psychotherapy in the Health Service and independently with adults as a psychotherapist. He is the author of The Limits of Interpretation and Cultivating Intuition and the Transaction titles True and False Experience and The Psychotherapy of Everyday Life. He has also edited The Predicament of the Family.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition; 1: Introduction; 2: The Nature of Illness; 3: Perceptual Distortion in Contemporary Society and Psychiatry; 4: The Merits and Limitations of Freudian Psychoanalysis; 5: The Existential – Phenomenological Approach to Psychotherapy; 6: The Hopeful Return to the Past; 7: The Attempt to Resolve Confusion; 8: The Practice of Psychotherapy

Editorial Reviews

This book is a sensitive and thought-provoking account of psychotherapy, which is worth reading.” —Paul Kline, New Society

From the Publisher