Welcome to Psychotherapy & Culture

Welcome to what I hope will be an informative, stimulating, and possibly even provocative series of exchanges about the relationship between psychotherapy and culture. My intention is to provide background to this topic, along with reviews of books, films, and other representations of the way psychotherapy impacts culture and culture – in turn- impacts psychotherapy – particularly in the U.S. I will be including some of my own experiences as both an anthropologist and a psychotherapist. I will also be including some interviews I have done with a number of leading psychotherapists throughout the world. I will be investigating and interrogating a variety of different psychotherapy “tribes” and “lineages”, such as psychoanalysis , cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy, Jungian depth psychotherapy, humanistic and existential psychotherapy, as well as a number of indigenous therapies in other cultures. I invite you to comment on my posts. I look forward to exchanging ideas with you.

Robert McAndrews, Ph.D.

Reviews

I will be posting occasional reviews of books, articles, films and television programs about psychotherapy. These reviews will be in random order and not in time sequence – in other words, some reviews will be about books from many years ago, while others will be very current. An example of a current review will be of the book by Catherine Clay (2016), “Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis”.

Interviews

During the last 25 years I have interviewed more than forty leading psychotherapists around the world. I will be sharing parts of these interviews along with some of my commentary. I contacted each therapist ahead of my arrival for the interview with a summary of the three essential questions I would be asking them. So they were somewhat prepared in advance with the direction  the interview might take. Of course there were follow-up questions and some of my interviews were more like dialogues or conversations than straight interviews. The three essential questions were: 1) What were your background influences in your decision to become a psychotherapist and develop your particular approaches and contributions to psychotherapy?

2) How would you describe the distinctions between what you have developed and written about from any other approaches to psychotherapy?

3) What do you anticipate your legacy to be? How might your work be continued and who might be your heirs? Also, what do you believe will be the future of psychotherapy?

I have included in this post a list of the therapist I interviewed. I will share parts of the interviews in future posts.

Voices of the Elders in Psychotherapy

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