Redecision Therapy is based on the premise that, through goal-setting and the reenactment of important childhood scenes, we may change our future and gain control of our lives. This revised and updated edition includes the innovative treatment techniques developed by the Gouldings, plus new material on short-term treatment for victims of childhood sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, and advice on how to utilize the strengths of each client to enhance and support therapy.

Editor Carolyn Lennox characterizes the redecision therapist as a director in an improvisational theater. Guided by the client's personal contract for change, the therapist helps the client select and rewrite old scripts in which he or she was cast as victim. By keeping the dialogue moving and assisting the client in confronting negative messages, the therapist supports revision of the last act so that the self can be experienced as triumphant protagonist and the victory can be carried over into everyday life. This compendium of contributions from twenty-two experienced redecision therapists first addresses issues of theory—how to negotiate a clear contract for change, how to identify client impasses, how to access the client's potential for creativity (what transactional analysis calls the "natural child")—and then illustrates applications of the theory in the treatment of depression, anxiety, bulimia, PTSD, and so forth in individuals and groups and in private, HMO, and hospital settings. Closing chapters discuss redecision therapy training and supervision. The book's thoroughly accessible approach to brief, action-oriented therapy will be welcomed by students and practitioners alike as what Dr. Lennox gracefully terms "teachable and learnable magic."

After fifty years of development and refinement in Transactional Analysis (TA), the theory of methods and the actual methods have changed considerably from those originally published by Eric Berne. Many concepts and methods have emerged and been subject to clinical experimentation, some have been refined and expanded and some are no longer used. This book includes contributions from several authors, each of whom presents his or her unique focus on how TA is used in their psychotherapy practice. This book will address the therapeutic effectiveness of various methods in TA and will cover a variety of topics such as unconscious experience, transference-countertransference, the therapist's transparency, transgenerational scripts, trauma and regression, psychological games, the self-destructive client, an integrative approach to the psychotherapy of obsession, gender psychopolitics, and psychotherapy from a social-cognitive perspective. It is written for both psychotherapists and counsellors who want to learn and refine their knowledge of contemporary TA methods that are most effective with today's clients.

In this pathbreaking and provocative new treatment of some of the oldest dilemmas of psychology and relationship, Gordon Wheeler challenges the most basic tenet of the West cultural tradition: the individualist self. Characteristics of this self-model are our embedded yet pervasive ideas that the individual self precedes and transcends relationship and social field conditions and that interpersonal experience is somehow secondary and even opposed to the needs of the inner self. Assumptions like these, Wheeler argues, which are taken to be inherent to human nature and development, amount to a controlling cultural paradigm that does considerable violence to both our evolutionary self-nature and our intuitive self-experience. He asserts that we are actually far more relational and intersubjective than our cultural generally allows and that these relational capacities are deeply built into our inherent evolutionary nature. His argument progresses from the origins and lineage of the Western individualist self-model, into the basis for a new model of the self, relationship, and experience out of the insights and implications of Gestalt psychology and its philosophical derivatives, deconstructivism and social constructionism. From there, in a linked series of experiential chapters, each of them a groundbreaking essay in its own right, he takes up the essential dynamic themes of self-experience and relational life: interpersonal orientation, meaning-making and adaptation, support, shame, intimacy, and finally narrative and gender, culminating in considerations of health, ethics, politics, and spirit. The result is a picture and an experience of self that is grounded in the active dynamics of attention, problem solving, imagination, interpretation, evaluation, emotion, meaning-making, narration, and, above all, relationship. By the final section, the reader comes away with a new sense of what it means to be human and a new and more usable definition of health.

This book is a compilation of twelve interviews with brief therapy experts and some of the field's most influential innovators (O'Hanlon, de Shazer, White, and Meichenbaum to name a few). The interviews, conducted to explore technical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of the theory and practice of brief therapy, offer the give-and-take spontaneity that can only be found in an interview style. The selection of the content is based on both the expertise of the interviewees as well as those issues of most concern to the field: managed care and economics, ethics, and being solution-focused.