Experiential Psychotherapy: A Symphony of Selves

"An extraordinary personal document that you may want to read all at one sitting...or take in small sips like a precious wine. This is a very easy book to read because it is totally intriguing. This book does what has been needed for years. It brings together and explicates the central principles of experiential psychotherapy and it does so in a disciplined fashion."-Larry Tirnauer, Past President, American Academy of Psychotherapists, GEORGIA PSYCHOLOGIST

"Using an informal writing style the authors have presented an interesting, informative and readable text covering the history, basic concepts and general principles of Existential Psychotherapy. It is recommended reading for all psychotherapists, notwithstanding their varied therapeutic philosophies."-Robert D. Weitz, PhD, ABPP, PYSCHOTHERAPY IN PRIVATE PRACTICE

The following is a forward to the book written by internationally acclaimed family therapist Carl Whitaker: Dick Felder grew up to be a concert organist-you know, 20 fingers and four feet and all the rest needed to make 500 pipes sing like Brahms or Beethoven wanted them to sing. Then he decided to go to medical school. The dean said, "No, you already have a profession," but by the next year he'd agreed. Those four years and the four years of fighting death on the hospital wards make him an organist who was a specialist in Internal Medicine. The he approached John Warkentin, Tom Malone and me to "learn" Psychiatry. Instead we refused that and insisted on revering his intuitive medical kind of Psychotherapy. We tried to eschew all indoctrination and to empower his old time doctor caringness. Here it is forty years later and the stories he can tell. Psychotherapy as a duet. The music of doctor and the other person echoes the drama of the two-console music with soft arpeggios and giant chords. His being pious about the body has eventuated into a veneration for the whole person and their music. For me being a grandfather is even more fun when one of your kids-Dick is only 70-is able to evolve a peership with one of his own kids-Avrum. Their belief system and its intimacy precipitates shivers. Mother Nature being sparked by their personhood. I can still hear Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" in that empty church that midnight in 1951 and by a doctor yet! was the console lighted?