Psychotherapy and counselling are now widely available to help people
overcome emotional and psychological difficulties in their lives. They
involve spending time with a professional in an emotionally safe and
structured relationship to explore and express the issues that cause
distress and difficulty, such as long term self-doubts, relationship
problems, or the impact of a trauma or crisis. As a society, we now take
this focus on talking through and understanding our identity and
relationships for granted, but it is hardly more than a century old.
In this Very Short Introduction, Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren
trace the development of psychotherapy from its origins in Freud's
psychoanalysis to the range of different approaches - counselling,
cognitive behaviour therapy, and other time-limited therapies,
mindfulness, group and family therapies, and many more. Describing the
processes central to them all and highlighting their differences, they
demonstrate what problems each therapy are best suited for. They explain
the principles behind the most commonly available types of
psychotherapies and provide examples of what patients can expect when
they seek such help. They conclude by examining the practice of
psychotherapy - the types of training psychotherapists have, the
safeguards that exist to keep practice reliable, and how one goes about
choosing a psychotherapist.
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