“In therapy, as in life, point of view is everything,” Pipher writes in her book Letters to a Young Therapist. In her practice, she projects a happy realism. The old grand masters of her field, like Freud, saw people driven by dark drives, repressions, and competitive instincts, but Pipher, who cut her professional teeth as a waitress, sees vulnerable, love-seeking people sometimes caught in bad situations. She tries to inhabit each person’s point of view and see them, sympathetically, as those who are doing the
