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Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) is the youngest of the arts therapies with practitioners coming together to form the first professional association in the discipline in the UK in 1982. DMP is currently used in clinical and non-clinical settings with a wide range of client groups (e.g., people with mental health problems, learning disabilities, and medical and/or complex conditions). This chapter highlights some similarities and differences between DMP and music therapy (MT). DMP and MT belong to the same family of arts therapies and practitioners are expected to define their work in similar ways, while sharing similar standards for training and agreed requirements for professional practice and registration. Both DMP and MT, along with other arts therapies, share some common features of practice such as the way they view and use the arts, the central role of creativity, imagery, symbolism and metaphor, the significant place of non-verbal communication in the development of the client-therapist relationship and in the transformative aspects of the therapeutic process.

To nonpsychiatric physicians the term psychotherapy often sounds vague and mysterious. Yet, the art of providing healing through the clinician–patient relationship is as old as medicine itself. Psychotherapy is a form of treatment that uses psychologic techniques within the context of this confiding clinician–patient relationship to treat mental symptoms and relieve emotional distress. Psychotherapy may be the main approach to treatment of identified symptoms, or it may be used as an adjunct to pharmacotherapy. The clinician–patient relationship at the core of psychotherapy can be distinguished from other confiding relationships a person may have with family members, friends, mentors, and advisors. In psychotherapy, there is a clearly identified provider of care and a recipient of that care. The provider is specially trained to deliver the care in a professional and coherent way, using specific psychologic techniques. Both the provider and the patient focus their attention on the patient’s specific problems and work together in partnership to address the elements of psychologic distress and improve the patient’s symptoms. The goal of psychotherapy may differ depending on the patient and his or her situation. Sometimes, the goal of psychotherapy is symptom reduction (eg, to decrease anxiety, improve mood, or reduce friction in an interpersonal relationship). It may be used to help an individual replace unhealthy, counterproductive ways of thinking or reacting with more adaptive ones. In other instances, the goal of psychotherapy may be educational or instructive and involve teaching techniques to expand an individual’s coping abilities or communication skills. All forms of psychotherapy develop an individual’s self-awareness and help bolster appropriate self-esteem. The therapeutic setting between patient and clinician establishes validation that the patient’s concerns are worth addressing and provides a sense of hopefulness that things can improve. As new options are explored and new techniques for dealing with distressing situations are discussed, patients develop an increased sense of mastery and feel less overwhelmed by life circumstances. Psychotherapy may take three main forms of: (1) individual, (2) couples or family, or (3) group. In individual psychotherapy, a single patient and therapist work together, focusing on the patient’s unique attitudes, perceived experiences, and behaviors that are associated with his or her current distress.

The author addresses the ethics of psychotherapy in terms of the interface between science and ethics, the goals of treatment, the therapeutic relationship, and special issues of confidentiality and therapist-patient sex. He considers the problems of multiple therapeutic modalities, dual allegiance of the therapist, the therapeutic use (and abuse) of power, and issues of dependency and suggests ways to maximize the clinician’s exercise of ethical choices. Ethical dilemmas in psychotherapy are not entirely soluble; ultimately, the therapist, guided by his or her profession as a group, still be able to find answers to the complex problems that inevitably arise.

After giving a brief overview of the phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective, this chapter traces the evolution of my conception of emotional trauma over the course of three decades, as it developed in concert with my efforts to grasp my own traumatized states and my studies of existential philosophy. It illuminates two of trauma’s essential features: its context-embeddedness and its existential significance. I also describe the impact of trauma on the phenomenology of time and the sense of alienation from others that accompanies traumatic temporality. While discussing the implications of all these formulations for the development of an ethics of finitude, it contends that the proper therapeutic comportment toward trauma is a form of emotional dwelling. The chapter concludes by analyzing the metaphysics of trauma in terms of a “phenomenological-contextualism all the way down,” which embraces the unbearable vulnerability and context-dependence of human existence.

This chapter addresses the determinants of help-seeking behavior and methodological issues related to the assessment of needs for care. Help-seeking behavior is affected by (a) prior personal experiences in looking for assistance, (b) the social environment and the influence of significant others, and (c) the overall disease and treatment concepts of the individual. Approaches to intervention range from a general political level to more specific health care policy. Finally, strategies are discussed for improving the way in which mental health professionals can shape their personal relationships with patients and learn to respect their ideas about the causes of their disorder so as to include them in all treatment decisions. In mental health care, the relationship between patient and therapist is one of the most important treatment factors, serving as a reliable predictor of outcome, regardless of diagnosis, setting, or type of therapy used. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

Jackie Stacey's essay on the idea of being ‘open to difference’ is a discussion of her experiences of two very different groups: an academic centre for the study of cosmopolitan cultures and an introductory course on group psychotherapy. Exploring ideas about being open to the differences other people represent, she shows how the complex interactions played out in the groupwork course offer important insights for rethinking cosmopolitan aspirations.

This chapter surveys psychotherapists’ common understandings for the primary terms the volume tracks: psychotherapy, religion, secular, science, medicine, Buddhism, spirituality, and terms for the ultimate aim of life such as enlightenment. Psychotherapists’ “conventional definitions” for these concepts are established as drawn from both textual analysis and data from interviews and ethnographic observation. The chapter then explains how therapists inherited these conventional definitions through brief histories of how European communities came to invent a modern concept of religion that is based on a Protestant prototype of inner belief or came to discover a Buddhism defined as atheistic (despite the evidence of Buddhist communities throughout history who propitiate deities). The chapter thus clarifies the socially constructed nature of these core concepts, concepts to which psychotherapists then contribute to in an ongoing revision and reconstruction.