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Psychotherapy is coming of age in Britain - this excellent and useful book and the new UK Council for Psychotherapy are witness to this. This is a book to be welcomed by a wide variety of people -potential psychotherapists and their teachers, training therapists and supervisors and, because it is also addressed to ‘the general public who may be needing help’, to potential patients. As the author's overall intention is to ‘demystify psychotherapy’, the question for her reviewer is how far she has succeeded in accomplishing this task for the lay person as well as the interested and potential professional.
From the many therapy organisations that are now in existence, Abrams has chosen to concentrate on individual one-to-one psychotherapy for adults, and in her book she has focused on the two largest and most common types of therapeutic help available, the psychoanalytical psychotherapies and the humanistic psychotherapies. The book is a detailed catalogue of twenty-six of the individual adult psychotherapy organisations and trainings in Britain.
But before she embarks on the detailed examination of these organisations and the trainings they offer, she presents her readers with a review of psychotherapy, what it is and what it can offer. Here she outlines the different types and levels of psychotherapy that are available; she looks at the limitations of the availability of psychotherapy in the NHS; the emergence (not before time) of the then UKSCP. She then considers the two types of training, the analytic and the humanistic, what they really mean and something of the differences between them. She has structured her consideration of analytical psychotherapy, which she addresses in greater detail than the humanistic approach, by looking at four major areas of internal controversy; Freud and Jung; the issue of ‘lay analysis’; the differences and similarities between psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and finally the question of psychoanalysis and homosexuality. In the se