While always welcoming candidates not just from the so-called ‘core professions’ but from a wide range of disciplines, the profession of psychotherapy is itself largely untouched by other disciplines. In few trainings, it would seem, is there much time for the study of texts outside of the clinical canon while the professional culture in general often seems to be curiously cut off from the wider world of ideas. Neither of these books is about psychotherapy yet both ought to be read by psychotherapists precisely because, from outside the world of psychotherapy, they address matters at the heart of our ‘impossible profession’.

Sampson's argument is simple and, for the most part, lucidly stated. He wants to put into question the dominant view of the ‘self in most Western thought, that is, of a ‘self-contained individual’. Borrowing an apt phrase from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, he calls this a ‘most peculiar self, one that would not make much sense to a great many people in other cultures and societies. In order to celebrate such a self,