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This edited collection was born out of the UKCP Professional Conference in 2004—a unique format for diverse perspectives on an age-old topic, the relationship between mind and body. Specifically, it is about how we as therapists engage, or do not engage, with the body. With the ever-expanding research and insights into this field — particularly via neuroscience—it is a timely collection. Inevitably, this can only be a personal, sketchy response.
Jung wrote: ‘The shuttling to and fro of arguments and affects represents the transcendent function of opposites’ (CW 8, para. 189). Essentially, therefore, the book is about the transcendent function at work in so many ways—although the term itself is not mentioned. While each contributor starts from a position on the materialist/spiritual continuum, each has their own particular ‘take’ on the mind, the body, the universe and how best to be a therapist. Also, in their expression and argument lies the archetypal push towards individuation which does not stop with the individual but applies too to the ‘body’ or grouping to which the individual ‘belongs’ and which represents a particular ‘take’. This spiralling of expression from the individual to particular alliances is contained within the UKCP umbrella in Britain. As such, there is a rumbling set of views aimed at those in what might be seen as an opposing umbrella organization, the BPC. One strong set of arguments therefore is around the questioning of psychoanalytic assumptions, and a charge that the body is, or has been, neglected in psychoanalysis.
In the first chapter, Wilkinson had the mammoth task of bringing together and making sense of the hidden dichotomies within the collection. His interests in pluralism and philosophical aspects of psychotherapy meant he was well equipped and he did so with extraordinary width and depth. His introductory quote is Buddhist. From this spiritual position, the physical world is analysable only in terms of experience. Wilkinson contra