What do psychoanalysts do and how do they know what they are doing? Technical answers to these questions speak of transference and resistance, countertransference and so forth; more general answers invoke terms like helping others and providing relief from mental distress. Underneath the technique, however, lie several thousand years of tradition governing the experiences of helping and of help-seeking, and of cultural meanings associated with helping and being helped. It's within this range of experience and meaning that Stanley Jackson, professor emeritus of psychiatry and of history of medicine at Yale, seeks to uncover the universal elements that, when combined, help people psychologically. These are ambient factors so powerful they exceed the boundaries of history, context, and even language.

For Jackson, “psychological healing” is a generic, neutral term that covers a wide range of restorative “approaches in which mental, psychic or psychological interventions are the essentials of practice” (p. 29).