The Art of Counselling and Psychotherapy

Counseling and psychotherapy are effective to the extent that they promote the creativity of patients. Creativity is both a lifestyle and a health resource. A creative lifestyle implies learning to be the authors of our own lives and a creative approach to our inner lives and our social environment gives us coherence and authenticity. This book derives creative principles for counseling and psychotherapy from practical modern approaches in these fields, as well as from psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and new concepts of creativity itself. The creative attitude central to this represents an integrative basis for the differential application of various counseling and treatment techniques. Creative psychotherapy is an aspect of dynamic and integrative psychotherapy. The hermeneutic principles -- memory, representational structuring, interactional experience -- are activated with a view to ridding patients of psychopathological symptoms. Creative counselling serves to assist in coping with distress and clearly defined conflicts, and encourages personal and professional development. In the modern world with all its challenges, creative counselling and psychotherapy are of outstanding importance. The book outlines a readily understandable, vital, and creative approach to the practice of counselling and psychotherapy in the service of the development of personal and social creativity. "The Art of Counselling and Psychotherapy is a felicitous combination of modern concepts of counselling and psychotherapy with perspectives squarely rooted in cultural studies. While geared to the requirements of psychotherapeutic practice, the book is of major interest not only for counsellors and psychotherapists but also for a wider audience." -- Prof. Dr. Otto Dörr Zegers, Santiago de Chile