Between Art and Science

Between Art and Science is both a celebration and a critique of contemporary psychotherapy. Jeremy Holmes is a practicing psychiatrist and psychotherapist in the N.H.S., who writes with infectious enthusiasm about the importance and usefulness of psychotherapy and its wider application within psychiatry. Holmes shows how psychoanalytical ideas can illuminate such clinical problems as disturbances of personal identity, adolescent loneliness, obsessionality, long-term mental illness, agoraphobia and suicide. He emphasises the importance of creativity in psychotherapy and the connections between the artistic and the psychotherapeutic impulse. He stresses that psychotherapy is an important humanising force within psychiatry and contemporary culture, and that the psychoanalytical vision acts as an important bridge between the arts and the sciences, combining the intuitive and the rational, the narrative with the experimental approach. Looking at both the strengths and the limitations of the psychoanalytical approach, Dr Holmes suggests that contemporary psychoanalysis needs to escape from its esotericism by taking into account advances in cognitive science, family therapy and the realities of psychiatric work in a public health setting. Between Art and Science makes a strong and persuasive appeal for an integrated approach to psychotherapy and in particular shows how analytic and family therapies can be reconciled at a theoretical level and can complement one another as part of an integrated psychological treatment service'.