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This short book is an expanded version of a series of six lectures given by Neville Symington in Australia during 2004. The lecture series asked the question: ‘How is it that someone who has a problem is able to resolve it through conversation with another?’ The question posed is not: ‘Can someone who has a problem resolve it through conversation with another?’ This question is tackled briefly in a section on whether it is possible to change in later life or whether only the early mother can have an effect on development, but mostly that question is presumed to have been answered in the affirmative, thus what is pondered throughout the book is how and why it is that psychotherapy works, the ‘how healing happens’ of the subtitle.
The fact that this was originally a series of lectures contains both its strength and its weakness. As always with Symington there are fascinating asides and quotations and linked thoughts, making it easy to pick up the book and read just a few lines or pages and get something from it, and read in this way it is most enjoyable. Mini-biographies of such varied figures as Bowlby and Cardinal Newman are most engaging, and Symington has a facility for illustrating a point with telling clinical anecdotes and literary