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Psychotherapy of depth, insight and relationship sits at a nodal point, embedded between psyche and social life, between the inner and the outer of our most personal experiences, between the obstacles we face and the opportunities we create. It is not called “the impossible profession” for nothing; in our rich and broken world, it evokes many roles at once – parent, interpreter, doctor, shaman, scientist, judge, teacher, sociologist, priest, alchemist and poet – but perhaps most central is its function as container of the most difficult and profound aspects of human suffering and healing. Admittedly a tall order, and yet we see possibilities that are as incomplete as they are invaluable. In short, psychotherapy of depth, insight and relationship has an essential and vital role to play in the much-needed healing of the world.
We three cochairs of the Psychotherapy Action Network hope that the essays in this issue have given voice to the significance of therapies of depth, insight and relationship. These therapies have not only transformed individual lives but have rippled out to affect family, friends, vocation and culture, acting, at their best, as both a force and a forum for social justice. We see in front of us the ways in which the personal and social embedded tiers of healing are inextricably linked. They are guided by a common urgency, to stand up for the rights of people to be treated as subjects rather than as objects – to consider our patients, in the words of John Thor Cornelius (this issue), as whole rather than broken – and to protect arenas in which relationships based on recognition, rather than on reductionism or exploitation, can flourish. Within these arenas, there is endless opportunity for work to be done. These perhaps vague and lofty goals are enacted concretely step by step, session by session, in consulting rooms around the world, but they also increasingly inform the efforts of psychoanalytic and other institutions to stretch themselves to enc