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In The Case for a Personal Psychotherapy Peter Lomas continues the theme of his last book True and False Experience; namely, the importance of the personal relationship between therapist and patient and the danger of this being rendered impersonal by the therapist's application of a body of scientific theory and technique acquired through rigorous training.
The book is set out clearly and enriched by apt quotations from a wide literary and philosophical field. It begins with a chapter on ‘The question of wisdom’. Psychotherapy should take wisdom as its central point. It then goes on to discuss the problems of arrogance and inequality in the therapeutic relationship with a chapter on ‘The ordinary and the special’. A therapist must be ordinary. The author uses the word ordinary to denote ‘the Greek affirmation of wholeness, a conception which neither denies nor overvalues the two frameworks of thought’. The two frameworks ascribed to psychoanalysis are on the one hand ‘the attempt to confine the richness of human experience within an appropriate scientific idiom’ and on the other an over-imaginative attitude which ‘dwells on the almost infinite symbolic meanings of an experience to an extent that detracts from the experience itself.’ These two paths of departure, the convergent and the divergent, are two forms of specialisation.
Lomas feels there is a flight from experience and a trend towards specialisation. ‘Ordinariness’ he says ‘is the absence of idealisation … a state of mind in which everything is given its proper due and appropriate meaning in relation to the whole’.