Peter Breggin is the country's best known opponent of biological psychiatry. He has written six books on the subject, including three medical books. Further, it was largely through his efforts that psychosurgery was done so rarely until its recent resurgence (Breggin, 1992).

One wonders, then, what kind of therapy he uses that enables him to circumvent the need for biological approaches. The Heart of Being Helpful is the first description he has given of how he works. The book is essentially a plea to therapists to be empathic toward their patients, whom he prefers to call clients. As he says, he abjures biological psychiatry on both ethical and scientific grounds. “Heroic” treatments are compared to what are called heroic medical