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Is love the answer to suffering? New book explores love’s link with therapy
So many of life's distresses have their origins in a lack of love, disruption of love, or trauma. People naturally seek love in their lives to feel complete. In Love and Therapy: In Relationship, authors and registered Psychotherapists, Divine Charura, Senior Lecturer in Psychological Therapies at Leeds Beckett, and Stephen Paul, former Director of the Centre for Psychological Therapies at Leeds Beckett, examine the place of love in therapy and whether or not it can be a substitute for love or even a cure.
Stephen Paul explained: “Life's problems and our ability to deal with them often are founded in the love we received as children and how we learned to succeed through our childhood experiences. In therapy we can revisit our problems and in therapy these problems can be resolved. Literally we learn to pour love on our wounds.
“Sigmund Freud noted the importance of love in the healing of the human psyche. Most therapists would shy away from calling what happens as love: they would call it a positive regard, warmth, or rapport, for example. In our new book, we suggest that these terms are all love by another name.
“Love is the balm that a troubled person needs to accept themselves and their past. Literally they need to love, and accept all parts of themselves. The love engendered in the therapeutic relationship allows for that healing to take place.”
The authors stress that within psychotherapy both ethical and professional boundaries should govern this 'love' at all times in order for it to be experienced as healing and therapeutic.
Love and Therapy: In Relationship has been published by Karnac Books and offers explorations of the complexity of love from different viewpoints: psychoanalytic, humanistic, person-centred, psychosexual, family and systemic, transpersonal, existential, and transcultural. The discussions challenge therapists and other allied professionals to think about their practice, ethics, and boundaries. It considers the therapeutic relationship in terms of 'love', and explores the complexities of the impact of love or lack of love on clients' lives and experiences and how this impacts on their behaviour: including how they present in the therapy room.
Stephen added: “In modern culture love has a prominent position. Television dramas, songs, novels and popular magazines all focus on love in its many forms. Is love the answer to suffering? Yet it is somehow neutralised in talking about the practice of therapy and we suggest, as Freud and others did but were uncertain of its power, that it is love that actually heals our wounds of the past.”
Competition: Karnac Books are offering a copy of Love and Therapy: In Relationship as a competition prize. To enter, simply email pressoffice@leedsbeckett.ac.uk with ‘Love and Therapy’ as the subject title by the closing date of Monday 29 February 2016.