Anthony Storr - The Art of Psychotherapy

Here is perhaps the most human, common sense and revealing account of psychotherapy available: what it is; how it should be practiced; what it can achieve.

Anthony Storr here presents the fruit of his 30 years experience teaching and practicing individual psychotherapy. In the ten years since it was first published the book has been widely read by psychotherapists in training or just beginning practice, as well as in, or entering, the helping professions.

For the layman, Storr's book constitutes a fascinating inside introduction, free of jargon and mystique.

This eminent psychotherapist argues that successful psychotherapy depends on developing an intensely personal patient-therapist relationship. He contends it is essential both that the psychotherapist possess a capacity for empathy with a wide variety of personality types; and be more concerned about understanding patients as whole persons than in diagnosing precise kinds of neurosis. An unusual chapter on The Personality of the Psychotherapist is included because the personalities of both participants must be taken into account in such an intimate relationship.

For Storr, psychotherapy today is not just a means of curing neurotic symptoms but of helping people suffering from problems of living. Skeptical of precise interpretations of symptoms, and impatient of terminology that tends to obscure rather than illuminate patients behavior, he offers a common sense synthesis of the most useful analytical techniques developed. He maintains that, as research discloses the factors common to successful treatment, the differences between the various analytical schools will disappear.

Perhaps the most important chapter, Cure, Termination and Results, calls into question the whole concept of cure as put forward by the pioneer psychotherapists. For Storr, psychotherapy is not about altering character or basic psychopathology. He offers instead a new definition of cure for dealing with problems to which there are no definitive answers.

Storr also considers vital issues such as when to end a course of analysis and the kind of conditions suitable for psychotherapeutic treatment.

This is a truly practical book for everybody who wants to understand what actually takes place between the psychotherapist and his patient.

This second edition includes an additional chapter titled Solitude, Interests, and Healing, drawing on the author's most recent work on the importance of the processes of healing that take place within the isolated individual. on the obsessional personality has been totally rewritten, and throughout, there have been additional revisions.

ANTHONY STORR was born in 1920 and educated at Winchester and Christ's College, Cambridge. He qualified as a doctor in 1944 and subsequently specialized in psychiatry. He is the author of many books, the most recent being SOLITUDE: A RETURN TO THE SELF (1989).

By the same author

The Integrity of the Personality

Sexual Deviation

Human Aggression

The Dynamics of Creation

Human Destructiveness

Jung

Solitude

Freud

Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind

Jung: Selected Writings