Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science: A New Model for Healing the Whole Person

Schaef ( Women Who Do Too Much ) dismisses traditional approaches to psychotherapy as addictive processes that promote codependency and interfere with the people's need--and right--to heal themselves. She proposes a new mode of healing (called ``Living in Process'') that is characterized by action and spirituality and that parallels the ``current paradigm shift in our scientific worldview'' away from the linear, reductionistic and dualistic framework that she contends has marked Western culture for centuries. In a lengthy first section Schaef details her own history, emphasizing her developing opposition to the conventions of her training and her early practice as a psychotherapist. In subsequent sections she explains ``deep process work'' (in which people allow buried emotions to surface without attempting to control them) and puts her theories in a historical context. Sometimes convincing, occasionally garbled and self-absorbed, always intense, Schaef's account offers a powerful model of her central argument that authority for one's actions and beliefs must lie within oneself. $60,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Nov.)