Forms of Feeling: The Heart of Psychotherapy

By Robert F. Hobson

First published in 1985. This book is aimed at readers who wish to learn how to engage in psychotherapy: for beginners, for experienced practitioners, for disciplined research workers, as for the author, the word 'psychotherapy' has a very broad meaning. The author describes this as an 'autobiography': the development of ideas, attitudes, and meanings which have arisen and been transformed through joy, sorrow, chaos, and relative tranquillity in a journey of forty years through the world of academic psychiatry, of analytical psychotherapy, of scientific research, and of life in a therapeutic community. To a large extent this book is an expression of individual experience.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1138171271
• ISBN13: 9781138171275
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Conversational Jungian

Hobson, a British Jungian training analyst, is well-read in poetry and philosophy, citing Wordsworth, Coleridge, Buber, and Wittgenstein. He pioneered in the use of audio and video tapes in therapy. A stammerer, he has reason to be especially concerned with therapeutic speech. His method is known as the Conversational Model. He cares how something is said. "The psychotherapist must also be something of an artist. Like all of us in our personal relationships, he needs to speak, however hesitantly, two different and yet related languages: the language of science and the language of art. Too much medical education consists of transmitting data, too little in conversing with patients. "The essential features of psychotherapy are those of any friendship...insofar as we are poor friends we are rotten psychotherapists and probably damaging analysts." Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank