A superb collection of essays of the highest quality that delivers in full what is promised in the title. Even the most experienced therapist will cherish the many therapeutic insights along with excellent nuts and bolts advice for the daunting new world facing the profession. Leston Havens's several brilliant essays are alone worth the price of the volume.
-- Irvin Yalom, Stanford University
Here are therapists working in the most difficult of circumstances, under time constraints, with gravely ill patients, with few resources. This collection of essays reshapes our understanding of the practical. Tact, clarity, the existential encounter—these human forces are what allow people to change. Sometimes affording hope, sometimes facing and bearing hopelessness, the senior clinicians assembled by Sabo and Havens show that there is no dark corner where the light of psychotherapy cannot be made to shine.
-- Peter D. Kramer, Brown University, author of Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave?
In a world of limited hospital beds, limited time, and even more limited funds, it's become increasingly hard to make a place for, or understand how to incorporate, psychotherapy. This terrific book, both practical and inspiring, could change that, and make a real difference to the culture of the mental health professions.
-- Tanya Luhrmann, University of California, San Diego, author of Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry
[The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice] is designed to educate the novice, elucidate new and innovative techniques with difficult populations, and sustain workers in the field in these difficult times of managed health care… These approaches privilege emotional learning and affective connection above the formalistic and arbitrary trappings of older psychoanalytic models, and are more easily applied to treatment in a range of settings. In summary, this timely book demonstrates the complexity of the field, the collegiality of its editors, and provides a rich meal for the hungry clinician.
-- Doreen Rothman, Ph.D. Berkshire Medical Journal
The editors posit that establishing an effective relationship between the patient and the psychotherapist is the essential first step in all forms of psychotherapy. The authors of the book's 12 essays elaborate on this thesis through their experiences as therapists in a variety of professional endeavors with patients/clients in medical, mental health, and social programs.
-- Donald J. Carek, M.D. Readings