Foundations of Psychotherapy: An Introduction to Individual Therapy

by Roger Horrocks

This book provides a comprehensive and clear survey of the major theoretical schools of psychotherapy - including Freudian, Jungian, humanistic and cognitive. There is also some consideration of the impact of new discoveries in neuroscience upon psychotherapy, and of the status of psychotherapy as a profession.

The book also provides a concrete, detailed and hands-on introduction to working with clients, with many vivid and helpful vignettes from actual sessions. Many practical issues are covered,
- How the setting for therapy can become a safe and secure container.
- Ways in which the therapist/client relationship can be used an invaluable tool in therapy.
- How client negativity can be handled.
- Methods for dealing with the difficult or disturbed client.

The book also covers more controversial issues such as the authentic relationship, the role of the body in therapy, and the therapist's own self-disclosure.

This book is an essential introduction to psychotherapy for all trainee psychotherapists.

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Alexis]

Obviously one can’t review a textbook like this on any sort of affective or hedonic criteria, so it’s probably fairest to simply state that I found this extremely useful – I underlined several things per page. I could complain about the fact that a printing error rendered the last two chapters illegible, with a full dozen pages left blank, but there are no coincidences in the life of the mind, and in its truncated form this book ends on an exquisitely suggestive note: “It strikes me that here we have one of the central struggles in psychotherapy, which takes us to the heart of the psyche, and the ambivalence which without doubt exists in all of us – whether to live or to die, whether to take a positive attitude to life or a pessimistic one, whether to say yes or no to the universe and our own existence.”