You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
According to the OED a handbook is ‘a small book … such as may be held in the hand’, and also ‘a book containing concise information for the tourist’. This handbook is neither particularly small nor handy since it attempts to cover a vast terrain. So, what kind of tourist has it in mind, the casual day-tripper wanting to know what psychotherapy is, or the serious traveller wanting to know more about the history and topography of this journey?
According to its blurb it is ‘for all health professionals and anyone interested in psychotherapy as practitioner, patient or general reader’. This is a remarkably wide brief: to introduce the non-professional to different types of psychotherapy and to some of its underlying issues and at the same time to be of interest to the practitioner. Surprisingly, there is something in it for both.
It is divided into five sections: Introduction, Culture, Modalities, Settings and Issues. The section entitled Culture, which includes race, gender, sexual orientation etc., raised some important questions, including the validity of having such a section. I wonder whether the ways in which such issues are addressed within a therapeutic context may depend more on the therapist's theoretical orientation than on their politics and value systems. This is particularly clear in Judith Hassan's fascinating contribution on working with survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Her chapter was not, in fact, about culture but about her understanding of how to work with individuals who have been through this unique trauma, i.e. about theory and practice.
I found it interesting to compare this book with a previous handbook, Windy Dryden's Individual Therapy: A Handbook. Dryden gave an overview of different theoretical approaches, Freudian, Jungian, Rogerian, Cognitive etc., while the handbook under review summarizes theories in a chapter, with several references to Dryden's book amongst others, and attempts to take us a step further by addressing issues and, in parti