Therapy and the Counter-tradition

'...a fascinating, quality read.' - Private Practice

'This welcomed book is recommended for those who wish to consider some potentially life changing implications of, rather than use, philosophy for their therapeutic practices.' - Professor Del Loewenthal, Chair of Psychotherapy & Counselling, University of Roehampton

"By reaching outside the increasingly narrow world of psychotherapy, this book offers us much needed resources to re-examine current practice from the proper perspective of the whole of human experience. The writing here returns us to a maturity of thought that is currently lacking in the profession of psychotherapy. We are invited to expand our questions and assumptions beyond ‘evidence-based treatments’, to include philosophical and creative insights. In the process, we regain a little of the personal humility that makes psychotherapy therapeutic in the first place. A real breath of fresh air." - Dr Greg Madison, author and psychotherapist

"Offering a clear dialogue between therapy and philosophy, Therapy and the Counter-Tradition is a much needed and most welcome book. In an age of what the editors refer to as "superficial pragmatism", this book promotes and provides philosophical integrity, which is often lacking in training and practice. Focusing on the work of twelve specific philosophers, a poet and a novelist, the book is wide-ranging, informative, and stimulating, while remaining coherent. This is book for thinking and thoughtful therapists. I commend the editors and recommend it highly." - Dr Keith Tudor, Professor of Psychotherapy, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand, and co-author of Person-Centred Therapy: A Clinical Philosophy (Routledge, 2006)

"A tour de force of critical insights--from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, from Keats to Kierkegaard--Manu Bazzano and Julie Webb have provided a rich banquet of ideas that are orthogonal to the complacency of tradition and the banality of contemporary psychotherapy. Drawing on a wide range of themes—ethics, politics, art, poetry and language—Therapy and the Counter-Tradition revitalizes philosophy as a way of life, offering a new infusion of vitality into the healing of the soul." - Ronald E. Purser, Ph.D., Professor of Management, San Francisco State University

"In an age where therapy’s literature is dominated by programmatic, allegedly evidence-based pretensions to scientificity and control, with meaning routinely reduced to superficiality and utility, we desperately need far more material that will fructify imaginations, embrace paradox and the ineffable, and challenge the Tradition of modernity and rationalism that, in the wrong hands, only impoverish the human condition. This exciting book uses engagements with key philosophers, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and Butler, Camus, Deleuze, Irigaray, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Schopenauer (amongst others), to do just that – a splendid text that is ‘full of being and becoming’, with (thankfully) not an ‘evidence-based’ claim in sight. My only (deep) regret is that this book didn’t exist when I was training as a therapist 25 years ago." - Dr Richard House, former Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, University of Roehampton, and author of Therapy Beyond Modernity and In, Against and Beyond Therapy

'This welcomed book is recommended for those who wish to consider some potentially life changing implications of, rather than use, philosophy for their therapeutic practices.' - Professor Del Loewenthal, Chair of Psychotherapy & Counselling, University of Roehampton

"By reaching outside the increasingly narrow world of psychotherapy, this book offers us much needed resources to re-examine current practice from the proper perspective of the whole of human experience. The writing here returns us to a maturity of thought that is currently lacking in the profession of psychotherapy. We are invited to expand our questions and assumptions beyond ‘evidence-based treatments’, to include philosophical and creative insights. In the process, we regain a little of the personal humility that makes psychotherapy therapeutic in the first place. A real breath of fresh air." - Dr Greg Madison, author and psychotherapist

"Offering a clear dialogue between therapy and philosophy, Therapy and the Counter-Tradition is a much needed and most welcome book. In an age of what the editors refer to as "superficial pragmatism", this book promotes and provides philosophical integrity, which is often lacking in training and practice. Focusing on the work of twelve specific philosophers, a poet and a novelist, the book is wide-ranging, informative, and stimulating, while remaining coherent. This is book for thinking and thoughtful therapists. I commend the editors and recommend it highly." - Dr Keith Tudor, Professor of Psychotherapy, Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa New Zealand, and co-author of Person-Centred Therapy: A Clinical Philosophy (Routledge, 2006)

"A tour de force of critical insights--from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, from Keats to Kierkegaard--Manu Bazzano and Julie Webb have provided a rich banquet of ideas that are orthogonal to the complacency of tradition and the banality of contemporary psychotherapy. Drawing on a wide range of themes—ethics, politics, art, poetry and language—Therapy and the Counter-Tradition revitalizes philosophy as a way of life, offering a new infusion of vitality into the healing of the soul." - Ronald E. Purser, Ph.D., Professor of Management, San Francisco State University

"In an age where therapy’s literature is dominated by programmatic, allegedly evidence-based pretensions to scientificity and control, with meaning routinely reduced to superficiality and utility, we desperately need far more material that will fructify imaginations, embrace paradox and the ineffable, and challenge the Tradition of modernity and rationalism that, in the wrong hands, only impoverish the human condition. This exciting book uses engagements with key philosophers, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and Butler, Camus, Deleuze, Irigaray, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Schopenauer (amongst others), to do just that – a splendid text that is ‘full of being and becoming’, with (thankfully) not an ‘evidence-based’ claim in sight. My only (deep) regret is that this book didn’t exist when I was training as a therapist 25 years ago." - Dr Richard House, former Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy, University of Roehampton, and author of Therapy Beyond Modernity and In, Against and Beyond Therapy