City Shadows: Psychological Interventions in Psychiatry

“The shadow destroys cultures if it is not valued and its meaning not understood.”

The city shadows are the repressed and unrealised aspects of us all, lived openly by the ‘mentally ill’. In this compassionate book the Swiss analyst Arnold Mindell, founder of process-oriented psychology, presents mental-health professionals of all kinds with new and exciting challenges in their work. Process-oriented therapy does not see patients, a priori, as sick, but as people experiencing, extremely, states with which we are all familiar to some degree; and they are best helped by connecting and working with the language of their bodies and interior worlds.

Describing the present mental-health industry, globally, as a ‘garbage dump’, the author urges its crisis-ridden specialists to come together in teams that see society as much in need of change as the individual is of understanding. We are,’ he says, ‘just learning about the forces and effects which move people… we need to be very humble and respectful of processes which we barely understand and get these processes and the people who manifest them to show us the way?’