The Hope of Therapy

This book is an argument for therapeutic freedom at a time when hyper-regulation and state interference threaten to suffocate and dominate psychotherapeutic practice. Therapy is inherently an ethical endeavour, both in the sense that the therapist is called upon to be responsible to and for the other who seeks help, and in the sense that it is inevitably bound up with ideas about how we should live and how we should treat one another. Therapy is not a matter of technique but is rather an art or craft and has much to learn from other forms of art and craft, such as painting, fiction, music and poetry. Like artists, therapists need to feel free if they are to be truly creative. This book is an argument for that therapeutic freedom. Like art, therapy inevitably carries within it an idea of hope, hope both for the individual who seeks help and hope for a better world.