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negotiate.' It is a space is which secrets can be spoken - where they feel, perhaps after many years underground, the first shock of light and air. The force for change that is unleashed in the consulting room is not a one-way process; the wise therapist changes too, and Jane Haynes shows how this happens. There is nothing formulaic about the dialogue she holds with her patients, and nothing doctrinaire. Anyone who comes to her book with an open mind and heart will see that the practice of psychotherapy she describes here is open, flexible and humanistic. It offers the possibility of healing - which is very different from the business of removing symptoms. It does not medicalise unhappiness or claim that unhappiness can be abolished. It offers the individual a way to survive, to progress, to thrive: to deal with our natural deficits and desires. What's lost, we want to find. What's damaged, we want to mend. The psychotherapeutic endeavour is a natural one, and it is wise; if it demands the close survey of our past lives, it is in order to create the possibility of doing better. Individuals and societies thrive when they learn from their history, not when they dumbly repeat it; and it seems to me that the desire to forge from past distress a present peace is the desire that binds the individual to society, that saves us from our long and weary alienation, that offers us at last a house, a home, a room that we can call our own.
Page: 9   Forward by Hilary Mantel        
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