At the heart of any therapeutic encounter there is always a story. Pat ients seeking help bring with them stories, spoken or untold, fragment ary and whole, that collectively make up their own personal narrative, their lived autobiography. Whatever else their tasks, a central part of the doctor's or therapist's job is to facilitate the telling of the se stories, to make meaning out of them and find the patterns within t hem. The aim of this book is to rehabilitate stories and story telling within medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy and to consider a narra tive approach both as a...

Psychotherapy is growing and changing rapidly, and much of this development is integrative in nature.
Integration in psychotherapy can mean many things, from the sequential or simultaneous use of different established techniques, through the adoption of specific hybrid therapies, to the flexibility that is found in the practice of mature clinicians, who consciously or unconsciously adopt techniques or theories borrowed from other disciplines. This book explores and expounds on these integrative currents as they affect the spectrum of contemporary psychological therapy.
In section one,...

Mental Health has finally come home to primary care, where 90% of all patients with psychological difficulties are diagnosed and treated, and where Governments increasingly see the bulk of mental health commissioning and practice as belonging. This book, whose contributors uniquely include leading figures from the world of both primary care and psychiatry, brings together the best of contemporary psychiatry with a deep understanding of the realities, challenges, and opportunities of general practice. The book is divided into four parts. The reader is taken from the first-hand experience of...

Jeremy Holmes explores the contribution of attachment theory to everyday clinical psychotherapeutic practice. Attachment theory provides an overall framework for thinking about relationships, or, more accurately, about those aspects of relationships that are shaped by threat and the need for security, themes that are centrally relevant to the work of psychotherapy. There is a growing feeling in the psychological sciences of the need for a new paradigm which can synthesise the best ideas from psychoanalysis, cognitive science and neurobiology into a more coherent whole. Attachment theory is on...

This first-class book provides and unrivalled basis for further discussion as to how to make psychotherapy more effective both ethically and professionally.

-This book is primarily about the ways in which psychoanalytically informed social work set out to help troubled children in the middle decades of the previous century. As such it represents an invaluable historical record. But I believe it has much wider contemporary relevance and resonance. Pointing backwards to the rediscovery of lost values, it also has significant links with the very cutting edge of twenty-first century social care.- - From the Foreword by Jeremy Holmes, Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit University College London, and Honorary Consultant Psychotherapist, Tavistock...

This year we have the pleasure to introduce Jeremy Holmes as a guest publisher. He is a topclass representative of Psychoanalysis himself and he succeeded in getting contributions of real value about the presence and the future of Psychoanalysis from authors who instigate a lively development of Psychoanalysis. In his Editorial 'towards a secure theoretical and evidential base for psychoanalytic psychotherapy' he gives an introduction and an outline of this collection of psychoanalytic writings which are not written for psychoanalysts but for all psychotherapists who want to know more about...