Touch in Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice

Touch in Psychotherapy sheds a bright light on a crucially important dynamic in therapy, that of touch. An honest discourse on this subject is many years overdue and this book is it. Readers are offered a conscientious and critical perspective on touch through the prisms of developmental, theoretical, ethical, research-based, and practice points of view. The contributors have identified and dealt objectively with the key problematic concepts of touch including how to make ethical decisions, how to factor in therapist and patient variables, and how to evaluate diagnostic, process, and therapeutic factors to promote effective therapy. This book presents the reader with a sensitive, respectful, critically objective picture of the role and function of touch in psychotherapy. A bonus to the reader is the sense of richness, dynamic movement, and exhilaration we can still experience as psychotherapists. Psychotherapy will continue to flourish as long as we nurture a pioneering mentality for critical exploration in underdeveloped, misunderstood, or controversial dimensions of our work. These authors are pioneers. --Linda Campbell, PhD, University of Georgia, Center for Counseling and Personal Evaluation

This book's contributors have taken a bold, fresh look at a vital dimension of psychological healing that most in the healing professions accept is important/m-/but that in recent years has fallen victim to the highly publicized and politicized behavior of an unscrupulous few. Challenging taboos, misinformation and prejudice, the contributors to this book collectively reexamine the touchy issue of touch in psychotherapy. Thanks to fears of lawsuits, on one hand, and the theoretical positions of establishment schools of psychotherapy, on the other, a whole generation of clinical professionals is graduating with no experience in how to make physical contact with their clients in ways that are responsible, respectful, and effective. This book, therefore, fills an important gap in the education of future psychotherapists by offering a beginning exploration of the case for touch in a wide range of therapeutic situations.... --Maureen O'Hara, PhD, Saybrook Institute