Drawing on his experience within psychiatry, Leston Havens takes the reader on a journey through the vast and changing landscape of psychotherapy and psychiatry today. Closely examining the dynamics of the doctor-patient exchange, he seeks to locate and describe the elusive therapeutic environment within which psychological healing most effectively takes place.

"All of us who have long done this work can look back at those happy times when the patient's gain has also been, in part, our own. Thereby an extraordinary joy enters the work, for both parties, through this making of lives. Can there be better work to do in the world?"--from the Epilogue by Leston Havens Managed care has radically reshaped health care in the United States, and private long-term psychotherapy is increasingly a thing of the past. The corporatization of mental health care often puts therapists in professional quandaries. How can they do the therapeutic work they were trained...

To penetrate the opaque, to lift the weight and let the self escape its frozen image - this is the essence of psychotherapy. In these portraits of patients at odds with themselves, Leston Havens takes us through the wonders and rigours of psychological healing and shows us what it really means in immediate, human terms, to come to life.

Since 1955, moving from early work in psychopharmacology to studies of clinical method and the psychiatric schools, Leston Havens has been working toward a general theory of therapy. It often seems that twentieth-century psychiatry, sect-ridden, is a Tower of Babel, as Havens once characterized it. This book is the distillation of long years of thought and practice, a bold yet modest attempt to delineate an "integrated psychotherapy." The boldness of this effort lies in its author's willingness to recognize the best that each school has to offer, to describe it cogently, and to integrate it...