In a time when clinical psychotherapy is becoming increasingly divided between biological psychiatry and new-age therapy, Robert Woolfolk’s new book gives us a carefully mapped out alternative. The Cure of Souls presents a sustained discussion of one main thesis: psychotherapy is not hard science; rather it is a practice firmly embedded in a system of human values. But we should not use this to protect psychotherapy from careful criticism. Especially in the last chapter, Woolfolk recommends that psychotherapy should be heterogeneous and thoughtful.

If you want a brief and useful introduction to some recent philosophical discussions of psychotherapy, then this is the book for you. Woolfolk does an admirable job of summarizing many different theoretical stances towards clinical psychology and mentioning some of the practical implications of those stances, all within the space of 137 pages of main text. He does not attempt to be exhaustive, and some readers may be glad that the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan are not even mentioned. Nor does Woolfolk engage in any sustained philosophical analysis; no more than a few pages are devoted to any single idea or philosopher. But he is one of the few authors who discusses Heidegger and Gadamer without giving me an immediate headache, and he also makes sense of Habermas, Donald Spence and Roy Schafer.

The main weakness of the book is that it mentions so many writers and paints with such a broad brush without carefully considering the practical implications of its message. Although Woolfolk clearly has a firm grasp of modern clinical realities, and writes with concise common sense about conceptually sophisticated ideas, he does not manage to spell out what his observations would mean in treatment or social policy. He is by no means alone in this fault, and this is now really the main task for philosophical discussions of clinical psychology. I hope his future work will address these issues in more detail.

Categories: Psychotherapy