Introduction

Abstract

This book, like many others before it, focuses on the business of psychotherapy and counselling which are known nowadays, in professional as well as lay circles, as ‘the talking cure’. The invention of these practices is greatly associated with Breuer’s work in the late nineteenth century with a patient of his, known as Anna O, who coined the phrase. Anna was diagnosed with hysteria and suffered many physical symptoms such as paralysis, aphasia, neuralgia and amnesia. In her case study she described how she experienced relief from her symptoms, distresses and concerns by verbalizing them and coming to understand their origins (see Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, 1991 [1895]). Since the time of Breuer, Freud and Anna O, several modifications have taken place within the field of psychotherapy. The past century has witnessed the evolvement of over four hundred different theories, clinical models and techniques, which encompass the field of psychotherapy today (Orlinsky and Howard, 1995; Norcross and Goldfried, 2005; Roth and Fonagy, 2005). These developments also include variants on the concepts, theories and techniques of the major psychotherapeutic approaches such as psychoanalysis, the humanistic therapies and cognitive-behavioural therapies. In fact, there seems to be so much diversity and so many subdivisions within each of the major psychotherapeutic systems that many schools have created new terminologies to highlight their differences (Bongar and Beutler, 1995).