A Humane Vision of Clinical Psychology, Volume 2: Explorations into the Practice of Compassionate Psychotherapy

The purpose of A Humane Vision of Clinical Psychology, Volume II,  is to encourage clinical and personal reflection on the part of reading  clinicians, so as to foster more thought about the meaning and  complexities of the therapeutic encounter. It does so by offering three  clinical examples and a searching discussion of what each might teach us  about the case at hand, ourselves, and the world.

The  book begins with an honest exploration of the limitations accompanying  any and every attempt to write about the action of psychotherapy, which  the first volume characterised as ineffable. More particularly, it is  suggested that the deepest therapeutic phenomenon, experiential  "proximity," is itself neither fully observable to the participants nor  capturable by a verbal account. These concessions, which effectively  confine the therapeutic "mechanism" to the air of every encounter,  threaten to make descriptions of psychotherapy useless. However, while  we can never rightly describe the fundamental cause of change, we can  describe its observable corollaries. It is then suggested that certain  therapeutic postures―those of kindness, openness, and  sameness―facilitate the expansion of the other’s cognitive apparatus and  thereby the "knowns" that inhabit their minds (the main goal of  therapy, per Volume I).

A Humane Vision of Clinical Psychology, Volume II,  is valuable for therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other  practitioners as well as graduate and undergraduate students in the  fields of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, mental health, social  work, and philosophy.