Wolfgang Giegerich

What Are the Factors That Heal? Wolfgang Giegerich

Written in the tradition of C. G. Jung and starting out from the insight that it is not we therapists, but the soul itself that heals psychological disorders, this book is not a manual offering advice to therapists about what to do in order to bring healing about. It rather offers a theoretical reflection about how healing is to be understood in a truly psychological (in contrast to medical) sense and it explores a range of factors that-generally part of the therapist's work in the consulting room-are in fact conducive to a possible healing. These factors include such aspects as the personality of the therapist, the abstract position of "therapist" in the objective institution of psychotherapy, the chosen setting, the role of the therapist's psychological theory, the extent to which one opens oneself to "the other", the work on consciousness's ideas, illusions, images, and dreams. In each case, an attempt is made to understand more deeply how specifically and why they contribute to healing. But since the healing effect is not in our hands, due attention is also paid to the limits of therapeutic work.