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Author: William M. Epstein
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412825849
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
In The Illusion of Psychotherapy William Epstein asserts that psychotherapy is probably ineffective and possibly harmful. He maintains that there is no credible clinical evidence that psychotherapy is effective in handling personal or social problems, or that it is more effective than other modes of treatment. The theories that underpin clinical practice remain speculative and their influence over social policy are more ideological than scientific. A skeptical public and its government would be better served, Epstein says, by credible evidence of outcomes. His analysis focuses on whether psychotherapy is effective against a variety of unwanted behaviors, such as drug addiction and depression. The nation's social problems are due to the inadequacies of its core social institutions: families, communities, education, and jobs. Social problems emerge because many people are brought up in deficient families, live in dangerous communities, lack education and jobs, and have few or no routes out of poverty. Poor people are exposed to unrelenting risks to their physical and mental health. It is possible to remedy most deficiencies through human services that compensate for these failed social institutions. This position is inevitably unpopular in psychotherapeutic circles and in light of current political preferences since it requires massive new resources and extensive redistribution of existing resources. The extent of society's problems reflects the degree to which deficits in basic social institutions have been tolerated. Basic services have been lacking while psychotherapy diverts our impulse to address poverty into ineffective strategies. In a challenging conclusion, Epstein urges society to solve its problems by confronting the reality implied by the failure of psy-chotherapy's minhnal interventions: to acknowledge that more is necessary to resolve social need. This leads to general theoretical concerns about theory as such. The Illusion of Psychotherapy will be compelling reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, social scientists, and policymakers.
Author: William M. Epstein
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412825849
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Get Book Here
Book Description
In The Illusion of Psychotherapy William Epstein asserts that psychotherapy is probably ineffective and possibly harmful. He maintains that there is no credible clinical evidence that psychotherapy is effective in handling personal or social problems, or that it is more effective than other modes of treatment. The theories that underpin clinical practice remain speculative and their influence over social policy are more ideological than scientific. A skeptical public and its government would be better served, Epstein says, by credible evidence of outcomes. His analysis focuses on whether psychotherapy is effective against a variety of unwanted behaviors, such as drug addiction and depression. The nation's social problems are due to the inadequacies of its core social institutions: families, communities, education, and jobs. Social problems emerge because many people are brought up in deficient families, live in dangerous communities, lack education and jobs, and have few or no routes out of poverty. Poor people are exposed to unrelenting risks to their physical and mental health. It is possible to remedy most deficiencies through human services that compensate for these failed social institutions. This position is inevitably unpopular in psychotherapeutic circles and in light of current political preferences since it requires massive new resources and extensive redistribution of existing resources. The extent of society's problems reflects the degree to which deficits in basic social institutions have been tolerated. Basic services have been lacking while psychotherapy diverts our impulse to address poverty into ineffective strategies. In a challenging conclusion, Epstein urges society to solve its problems by confronting the reality implied by the failure of psy-chotherapy's minhnal interventions: to acknowledge that more is necessary to resolve social need. This leads to general theoretical concerns about theory as such. The Illusion of Psychotherapy will be compelling reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, social scientists, and policymakers.
Author: Stanley Teitelbaum
Publisher: Jason Aronson
ISBN: 9780765705174
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Mourning the loss of core illusions and coping with the impact of disillusionment are critical issues in psychotherapy. In this informative and readable book, Teitelbaum explores this therapeutic issue in depth from a developmental, theoretical, and clinical perspective and emphasizes its particular importance in the treatment of depressed and narcissistic patients.
Author: Tobias G. Lindstad
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030430669
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
This book explores and provides an overview of the Norwegian psychologist Jan Smedslund's life work on Psycho-logic. His contributions to science have been radical not only in challenging the empirical foundation of psychology, but also in seeking to develop a viable alternative. This book brings together various reflections on his key contributions from the 1960s to the present day. The volume features three chapters by Jan Smedslund, offering his updated views on psychological science and psychotherapy. It also features contributions from several scholars that critically evaluates his legacy. His seminal ideas are discussed, revised and expanded upon and the questions raised are put in relevant historical and interdisciplinary context. Respect for Thought is a valuable resource for psychological researchers, historians of psychology, cultural psychologists, critical psychologists, theoretical psychologists, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists, social scientists, philosophers of psychology, and philosophers of science.
Author: Mark Epstein, M.D.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593296621
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
“A warm, profound and cleareyed memoir. . . this wise and sympathetic book’s lingering effect is as a reminder that a deeper and more companionable way of life lurks behind our self-serious stories."—Oliver Burkeman, New York Times Book Review A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year’s worth of therapy sessions with his patients to observe how his training in Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism, in tandem, led to greater awareness—for his patients, and for himself For years, Dr. Mark Epstein kept his beliefs as a Buddhist separate from his work as a psychiatrist. Content to use his training in mindfulness as a private resource, he trusted that the Buddhist influence could, and should, remain invisible. But as he became more forthcoming with his patients about his personal spiritual leanings, he was surprised to learn how many were eager to learn more. The divisions between the psychological, emotional, and the spiritual, he soon realized, were not as distinct as one might think. In The Zen of Therapy, Dr. Epstein reflects on a year’s worth of selected sessions with his patients and observes how, in the incidental details of a given hour, his Buddhist background influences the way he works. Meditation and psychotherapy each encourage a willingness to face life's difficulties with courage that can be hard to otherwise muster, and in this cross-section of life in his office, he emphasizes how therapy, an element of Western medicine, can in fact be considered a two-person meditation. Mindfulness, too, much like a good therapist, can “hold” our awareness for us—and allow us to come to our senses and find inner peace. Throughout this deeply personal inquiry, one which weaves together the wisdom of two worlds, Dr. Epstein illuminates the therapy relationship as spiritual friendship, and reveals how a therapist can help patients cultivate the sense that there is something magical, something wonderful, and something to trust running through our lives, no matter how fraught they have been or might become. For when we realize how readily we have misinterpreted our selves, when we stop clinging to our falsely conceived constructs, when we touch the ground of being, we come home.
Author: William Epstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351293184
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
In The Illusion of Psychotherapy William Epstein asserts that psychotherapy is probably ineffective and possibly harmful. He maintains that there is no credible clinical evidence that psychotherapy is effective in handling personal or social problems, or that it is more effective than other modes of treatment. The theories that underpin clinical practice remain speculative and their influence over social policy are more ideological than scientific. A skeptical public and its government would be better served, Epstein says, by credible evidence of outcomes. His analysis focuses on whether psychotherapy is effective against a variety of unwanted behaviors, such as drug addiction and depression. The nation's social problems are due to the inadequacies of its core social institutions: families, communities, education, and jobs. Social problems emerge because many people are brought up in deficient families, live in dangerous communities, lack education and jobs, and have few or no routes out of poverty. Poor people are exposed to unrelenting risks to their physical and mental health. It is possible to remedy most deficiencies through human services that compensate for these failed social institutions. This position is inevitably unpopular in psychotherapeutic circles and in light of current political preferences since it requires massive new resources and extensive redistribution of existing resources. The extent of society's problems reflects the degree to which deficits in basic social institutions have been tolerated. Basic services have been lacking while psychotherapy diverts our impulse to address poverty into ineffective strategies. In a challenging conclusion, Epstein urges society to solve its problems by confronting the reality implied by the failure of psy-chotherapy's minhnal interventions: to acknowledge that more is necessary to resolve social need. This leads to general theoretical concerns about theory as such. The Illusion of Psychotherapy will be compelling reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, social scientists, and policymakers.
Author: David Smail
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429914733
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
This work challenges the notion that anxiety and depression amount to a mental illness denoting that something is wrong with the individual sufferer. Instead, anxiety and depression are described as perfectly rational responses to difficulties in the sufferer's world, experienced subjectively by that person. An essential contrast is drawn between objective conceptions of normality (what reality ought to be as per commercial and other objectifying sources) and the reality of the individual's subjective experience of the world (abuse, unemployment, and so on). Chapters include tackling the myth of normality; examining shyness; and analysing the way in which assumptions behind the use of language can foster anxiety and depression. The book's primary purpose is to explain the meaning of anxiety as experienced by the sufferer. These insights also lead to a view, by way of secondary purpose, that the role of the therapist is not in 'curing' the individual, but rather to negotiate demystification and to provide insight into the effects of the problems in the sufferer's world, based on the sufferer and the therapist's shared subjective understanding.
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 1608684563
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Before he became a counterculture hero, Alan Watts was known as an incisive scholar of Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy. In this 1961 classic, Watts demonstrates his deep understanding of both Western psychotherapy and the Eastern spiritual philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. He examined the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that questioned the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserted that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self. When psychotherapy merely helps us adjust to social norms, Watts argued, it falls short of true liberation, while Eastern philosophy seeks our natural relation to the cosmos.
Author: Stephen Bacon
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498552277
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 419
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Book Description
In Practicing Psychotherapy in Constructed Reality: Ritual, Charisma, and Enhanced Client Outcomes, Stephen Bacon charts a radical and provocative new direction forward for psychotherapy. Based on the research finding that techniques have no inherent power, and the insights of constructionism, Bacon explores new ways of understanding therapeutic rituals, therapist charisma, and client-centered therapy. Special emphasis is given to an analysis of the work of master therapists, and all of the concepts are illustrated with numerous clinical examples. Finally, Bacon develops a geography of constructed reality which pragmatically supports deliberate practice and therapist mindfulness.
Author: Kate Schechter
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822376423
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 430
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Book Description
A pioneering ethnography of psychoanalysis, Illusions of a Future explores the political economy of private therapeutic labor within industrialized medicine. Focusing on psychoanalysis in Chicago, a historically important location in the development and institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the United States, Kate Schechter examines the nexus of theory, practice, and institutional form in the original instituting of psychoanalysis, its normalization, and now its "crisis." She describes how contemporary analysts struggle to maintain conceptions of themselves as capable of deciding what psychoanalysis is and how to regulate it in order to prevail over market demands for the efficiency and standardization of mental health treatments. In the process, Schechter shows how deeply imbricated the analyst-patient relationship is in this effort. Since the mid-twentieth century, the "real" relationship between analyst and patient is no longer the unremarked background of analysis but its very site. Psychoanalysts seek to validate the centrality of this relationship with theory and, through codified "standards," to claim it as a privileged technique. It has become the means by which psychoanalysts, in seeking to protect their disciplinary autonomy, have unwittingly bound themselves to a neoliberal discourse of regulation.
Author: Allan Young
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821932
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
