Psychotherapy and counselling are now widely available to help people overcome emotional and psychological difficulties in their lives. They involve spending time with a professional in an emotionally safe and structured relationship to explore and express the issues that cause distress and difficulty, whether long term self-doubts, relationship problems, or the impact of a trauma or crisis. As a society, we now take this focus on talking through and understandingour identity and relationships for granted, but it is hardly more than a century old. In this Very Short Introduction, Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren trace the development of psychotherapy from its origins in Freud''s psychoanalysis to the range of different approaches - counselling, cognitive behaviour therapy, and other time-limited therapies, mindfulness, group and family therapies, and many more. Describing the processes central to them all and highlighting their differences, they demonstrate what problems each therapy a
