by Robert A. Graceffo (Author)
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.
