Synopsis
The anthology, written by both psychotherapists and prize winning fiction authors, is a book of surprise, delight, anguish and hope. It draws on one of the most intimate conversations that a human being can achieve - that of the psychoanalytic hour - and gives these encounters a fascinating context in the form of people's lives.

Description
Anyone with a faint curiosity about human nature will be enthralled by these remarkable stories. Based on true experience, or re-worked into fictional short stories, this book takes the reader through a mesmerising sequence of compelling pieces that reveal the innermost concerns of psychotherapy practice.
Some of these stories give strong evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy - how by reaching into someone's most private desires and needs and listening to these, remarkable transformations can occur. Others ask the reader to consider the fallibility or vulnerability of the therapist and their own concerns and lives. Without exception, the authors have written with courageous openness, revealing the emotional challenge of receiving therapy, or being someone who provides it.
Wise, mature, witty, and occasionally grim, this is an essential and most enjoyable read about the subject of life.
'In reading these tales, we enter a mythic consulting room, the walls papered over with the fragments of lives woven together into a mosaic of the human heart and mind.' - Marilyn Charles.

About the Editor
Jane Ryan initially went to art school in Canterbury, and then followed a career in community development. She founded an intercultural community centre in St Paul's, Bristol, now known as Kuumba. She trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the early 1990s and then set up Confer, an independent organisation that offers a platform for leading thinkers in mental health and an inclusive space for the exchange of views between theoretical approaches within mental health and medical disciplines. She is the editor of ‘How Does Psychotherapy Work?' (Karnac 2005).