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To begin with a partly rhetorical question: why do psychotherapists pay so little attention to philosophy? Partly rhetorical, because this is definitely more than merely beginning to change, and this book is an emphatic indication of that. But, in certain ways, it is also a formidable indication of the difficulties which make it a problem in the first place. That is what makes it very interesting.
Indeed, it certainly is a very substantial and very interesting attempt to address the challenge. There are books which go several miles out of their way to be reader friendly, and, for the avid reader with an intense and probing curiosity, end up being dull and exasperating, by trying too hard to be too accessible and ending up as bland, or too much like a comic strip. This book is not one of these. It is a book to get one's teeth into—if that is not an overly “orally aggressive” metaphor. It genuinely wrestles with the problems, and is a substantial, creative, and patient book for the psychotherapeutic reader who likes a challenge.
Another relevant question, not so rhetorical: why do integrative psychotherapists struggle so much when they endeavour to define what integrative psychotherapy is? Something we must not tell our modality-based colleagues, lest they scorn us for being veritable Hamlets of theoretical indecision, and treat us integrative psychotherapists, not as part of the fourth modality, but as an optional extra overlapping with counselling—a relic of class warfare in psychotherapy which is in fact a sort of category mistake, because modality is applicable throughout the frames of counselling and psychotherapy.
This book wrestles with that question to some purpose, in conjunction with its wrestling with philosophy, in the course of both of which it wades quite deeply into the water meadows of postmodernism. Has it bitten off more than it can chew, in fusing these two aims, together with providing a great deal of content and illustration, on the nature and