This book takes the discursive and postmodern turn in psychotherapy a significant step forward and will be of interest to all those working in mental health who are concerned with challenges to oppression and processes of emancipation. It achieves this by: reflecting on the role of psychotherapy in contemporary culture; developing critiques of language in psychotherapy that unravel its claims to personal truth; and the reworking of a place in the transformative therapeutic practice.

Deconstruction is brought to bear on the key conceptual and pragmatic issues that therapists and clinical...

Examines the arguments on the discursive and postmodern turn in psychotherapy. The contributors reflect on the role of psychotherapy in contemporary culture; develop critiques of language in psychotherapy; and rework a place for the subject in the transformative therapeutic practice.

Fast becoming a contemporary classic... this book tries both to be critical and engender critical thinking in a number of ways. It offers an overview of a number of theories that address human distress as well as particular forms of "pathology." This book effectively highlights the way that western society has taken "normal"; and "abnormal" emotional states to be factual entities rather than the constructed understandings of human phenomena that they are.... should be on the reading list of every course//module that attends to human distress' - "Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis...