Issue 5:3 TITLES AND ABSTRACTS Fall 2006
Being-with and being-counter: Person-centered psychotherapy as an in-depth co-creative process of personalization. Peter F. Schmid & Dave Mearns Abstract This paper continues and extends the exploration of the philosophical, theoretical and practice basis to the relationship emphasis within person-centered therapy stressing the relevance of a deeper therapeutic encounter between therapist and client (Schmid, 1994, 1998b). The paper goes on to explore the nature of this encounter in terms of the therapist’s presence and the different forms of resonance offered by the therapist to the client. Emmanuel Levinas: Resource and challenge for therapy. Richard Worsley Abstract This article sets the study of Levinas in the context of therapists’ use of philosophy, and in particular in Peter Schmid’s use of Levinas. It offers an alternative emphasis in reading his work, based on three key themes: Totality; Infinity; the Face. Each of these three themes will be explored as an aspect of Levinas’ metaphysics. They will then be used to explore the Person-Centered Approach. Levinas’ three categories will then engage with the three core conditions of therapy. This in turn raises the question of what it is to meet an Other – encounter. Finally the concept of performative, internal speech will be set out as a key to understanding the transformation of the therapist’s attitude in encounter in the light of Levinas. The development of intersubjectivity in relation to psychotherapy and its importance for pre-therapy. Hans Peters Abstract. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the importance of intersubjectivity in relation to psychotherapy, especially to the application of Pre-Therapy. The article shows that intersubjectivity, and imitation as a particular kind of intersubjectivity, is an innate capacity, the development of which starts in the first hours of life by mutual imitation between mother and child. The mutual imitation of the mother and the neonate much resembles the application of pre-therapeutic interventions by the therapist. This leads to the thesis that Pre-Therapy, as promoted by Prouty, can be seen from a developmental frame of reference in which the success of the application of pre-therapeutic reflections, even with severely contact disturbed adults, proceeds because of the innate potentialities we have since childhood. Research on mirror neurons, as published by Gallese, lays the neurobiological foundation for intersubjective development and is explicitly described. A person-centered approach to schizophrenia. Jan van Blarikom Abstract. The person-centered approach has paid little attention to persons with schizophrenia. There has been a reluctance to work with a medical diagnosis. Instead of that people with schizophrenia have been saddled with dubious psychological diagnoses. Schizophrenia is a noun that describes the objective side of a human suffering. The author calls for an acknowledgement of the illness. He argues that only when one is willing to give the illness its proper place one is able to see the interrelatedness between illness and person. In the case of a severe mental illness the person cannot be separated from the illness. There is no reason to carry on a controversy with present-day psychiatry. The person-centered approach can do invaluable work helping the person with a severe mental illness to retrieve a valued self.
Reviews Jesse D. Geller, John C.Norcross, David E. Orlinsky (Eds.), The psychotherapist’s own psychotherapy: Patient and clinical perspectives.
Reviewed by Henk Hanekamp.
Cain D. & Seeman, J. (Eds.). Humanistic psychotherapies: Handbook of research and practice.
Reviewed by Christine H. Farber |