ok my book review keeps getting put aside because i have seven million other things to do but this is a cliff's notes of the points because i do think they're relevant to this audience and because i need to get my brain in order to do the proper review
ok i read jon g allen's (2025) 'bringing psychotherapy to life through caring connections' which is a title that does not inspire confidence and let me tell you if you were judging books by their covers this would go directly in the bin.
BUT: actually a pretty good book. i have some gripes with bits of it: he sort of lumps a lot of stuff together under the label 'scientism', some of which i agree with (manualisation, the tendency to put a STEM veneer on random psychotherapy stuff to legitimise it, the valorisation of cognitive over the other aspects of internal processing and experience, the lack of actual respect for scientific evidence) and some of which i don't (he makes several allusions to a sort of spirituality that, in terms of the experience he's describing, does not in my opinion require any actual subscription to any particular mode of 'spirituality', and im perfectly capable of experiencing what he describes as the third without it). but overall it's pretty good.
the things i thought were good about it:
he has a neat section talking about some work on what psychotherapists seem to be like, and states something i certainly believe, which is that a reasonable percentage of the people doing this work should absolutely not be doing it.
he also talks about the weirdness of when you start doing the work and are sort of trying to follow the book as it were but your patients keep talking to you about real actual daily problems and you're trying to redirect them to the book and like: it's dumb. it's bad, you should meet the person where they are. this is so interpersonally obvious and yet something the mental health 'sector' sort of makes hard to do.
the main point of a lot of the book is that the work that's done when psychotherapy works is basically through the relationship, through the person having that connection with you in a space where they can safely rupture and repair the relationship, and experience the feeling of being understood by another person
i really like his idea of unformulated experience and also that we reformulate this all the time. in personality development we refer to this as narrative functioning - reflective thinking about your life that gives you a coherent understanding about yourself. he doesn't say this but i'm of the opinion that people who are good at this (and going along with it, have baseline pretty good mentalising) often find psychotherapy unhelpful as they don't really need another party to do this - they could just as easily read a book.
following from this the main points of the other person (aside from accountability and giving you time to do it) are 1) as above to provide a stable relationship and evidence to the patient that they are not fundamentally off-putting and are in fact capable of explaining themselves to be understood and 2) providing input to support the creation of that narrative, particularly where the person themselves is going to put a nasty spin on their self-description if left alone
i do like the stuff about the moral basis he has in here because definitely some of the worst excesses of therapy culture are where the 'non-judgemental' space becomes a way for the patient to only get reassurance and never get challenged to look at their own behaviour through a fair lens (the season of the sopranos where carmela tries psychotherapy is a useful reference on this concept btw)
he talks about the third like it's mystical but i tend to think it's that shared human experience (actually, doesn't have to be human imo, definitely something some people experience with pets) of understanding, of mutual experience of something, that's really fundamental to 1) liking other people and being able to function with them in a complex society and 2) not distorted by having to be communicated through language which is definitely something lots of people are variably able to do. for example i often experience the third with my baby daughter
he does quite neatly tie a lot of this into developmental stuff and i do think this is where attachment is so useful - not in a tiktok sort your ex boyfriends by type sense but in an understanding how we learn to have relationships with others and to understand others, from our first relationships, which we start to build before we have language.
anyway that last one also relates back to the narrative point in that people who have good scaffolds of these things often can't relate to or identify at all with the experience of needing therapy for this stuff
not sure how legible this all is but id better get back to work. will share proper review once i get it done
