Four Approaches to Counselling and Psychotherapy

Rating:
Summary: Know thyself and start to feel better
Review: Review of 'Four approaches' by Jill Mytton and Windy Dryden

This book changed my attitude to psychotherapy. I used to go round quoting Seamus Heaney's line 'Glimmerings are what the soul's composed of' as a defence against the idea that the human mind and soul (or psyche or spirit) could be explored and mapped to any therapeutic effect. 'Four Approaches' made me think again.

Its subject -as set out on the first page- is 'the healing of emotional problems' and it is structured around four men, Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis and Arnold Lazarus. We are given enough biographical detail to be able to grasp what led each of these men to their own distinctive approach to counselling and psychotherapy and there is a careful, lucid structure which enables us to see how these 'schools' developed and the highways and byways that have grown from their work. The book is a miraculous balance between academic rigour and the engagement of a lay reader (like me) in the passion and compassion of the process of counselling.

We all know far more about the great Sigmund than we realize. His phrases have entered the common language and he bestrides the 20th century like a colossus. It was a thrilling experience to have all the disconnected Freud fragments in my mind brought together into an ordered (and often moving) account of his life and work. Carl Rogers was only a name to me but he is much more than that now. His detailed metaphors of the human psyche as a plant struggling towards light and moisture (often against fearful odds) will remain with me. As an asserter of the value and distinctiveness of the individual soul Rogers is right up there with Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Yeats. (Despite the efforts of the author though, the language does sometimes get in the way a bit. 'Organismic valuing process' doesn't quite make it alongside 'Life's but a walking shadow', but in this book jargon is kept to a minimum and it is always explained clearly.) Ellis and Lazarus are different again. Ellis challenges the innate gloominess of a depressed person's thinking and offers an attractive do-it-yourself kit to turn it all round. Lazarus is the most eclectic and is saying in effect, 'don't decide on the tool until you have spotted the problem.'

The last part of the book runs the four approaches in parallel by showing a therapist from each school dealing with the same case. But by the time I reached there the book had already done its work. There is a Chopinesque blend of discipline and passion in the writing and the content of this book and I was stimulated and uplifted by it. And I even suspect that it has made me marginally more positive and cheerful. Go and read it for yourself.