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How to Find the Right Therapist: What Matters Most
Finding the right therapist involves more than choosing a particular approach or finding someone with similar experiences. This guide explores qualifications, trust, practical compatibility, initial consultations, and how a therapeutic relationship may develop.
aphillipsarts
Apr 2711 min read


Why Make Images in Psychotherapy?
Why might making an image have a place in psychotherapy? This article explores images as forms of psychological life, their ancient human history, and their role within therapeutic work.
aphillipsarts
Apr 1411 min read


What Happens in Art Psychotherapy?
Art Psychotherapy brings conversation and image-making together, but using art in sessions with me is always optional. This article explores what happens during a session, how images are approached, and why no artistic skill is required.
aphillipsarts
Mar 308 min read


What is Depth Psychotherapy?
Depth psychotherapy explores the deeper and often unconscious dimensions of experience. This article considers how it works, what sessions may involve, and who might be drawn to this reflective approach.
aphillipsarts
Mar 248 min read


Winnicott: Playing and Reality, and Frankel: The Adolescent Psyche
What does it mean to play in psychotherapy? And what does it mean to become, especially in adolescence? Two books that have shaped my clinical thinking in profound ways are D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality and Richard Frankel’s The Adolescent Psyche. Though written in different contexts, both works invite us to reconsider how we understand psychological growth, creativity, and transformation. At their heart is a shared concern with something alive in the psyche: the space
aphillipsarts
Feb 115 min read


50th Anniversary of Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman
Fifty years after James Hillman published Re Visioning Psychology, his work remains vivid, challenging, and creatively alive. This article explores Hillman’s life, ideas, and contributions to archetypal psychology, with reflections on image, soul, dreams, imagination, and the deep ecological and cultural themes that shaped his vision.
aphillipsarts
Dec 5, 202513 min read


Psychotherapy for Artists and Creatives
Art can become inseparable from identity, vocation, and the shape of a life. This article explores psychotherapy for artists navigating blocks, exposure, recognition, livelihood, and change.
aphillipsarts
Nov 28, 20258 min read


Feeling Unsure About Starting Therapy
Beginning therapy can bring uncertainty alongside hope, curiosity, or apprehension. This article considers familiar concerns such as not knowing what to say, fearing judgement, and wondering what therapy may offer.
aphillipsarts
Nov 19, 202510 min read


Astrology and Depth Psychology: Finding Meaning in the Heavens
A personal reflection on how astrology and depth psychology meet within the shared language of symbolism, offering new ways to understand psyche, relationship, and meaning.
aphillipsarts
Nov 10, 20254 min read


Online Psychotherapy in the UK
Can a meaningful therapeutic relationship develop through a screen? This article explores psychological depth, privacy, presence, and the experience of attending psychotherapy from home.
aphillipsarts
Jun 20, 20257 min read


Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy: Listening to the Earth
What does it mean to listen to the Earth? Not as a metaphor, but as an act of reverent attention. For those whose work engages with psyche and image (particularly psychotherapists and artists in this instance) the question can evoke something ancestral, a realignment of the senses with our most natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply: to silences, the symbolic, to psyche speaking through image and metaphor. So what happens when we turn this sa
aphillipsarts
Jun 13, 20257 min read


Symbolic Imagination: Warren Colman and the Emergence of Archetypes
An exploration of material becoming living presence in the art object. Jungian analyst Warren Colman explores the formation of archetypes as derived from human engagement with their social and material environment. This is a phenomenological approach which sees psychic life as emergent from embodied action in the world, in contrast to a classical Jungian perspective which would view archetypes as pre-existent, either “inborn” biologically, or metaphysically a priori. As I und
aphillipsarts
Apr 23, 20255 min read


Adam Phillips on Attention Seeking: Curiosity in Therapy and Art
If explanation is the self-cure for curiosity, we have a lot of explaining to stop doing; if desire is the refuge from wide-angled attention, we have a lot of wanting to relinquish. In Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips offers a way of thinking about attention that moves beyond the obvious. Attention is something we give and receive, and is in turns needed, wanted, and feared in its various forms. In psychotherapy, we notice that a symptom, or a state of mind, is something that
aphillipsarts
Apr 15, 20254 min read


"James Hillman: An Artist of Psychology."
The work of James Hillman can feel both compelling and difficult to approach. His writing does not sit easily within conventional ideas of psychology, and often asks something different of the reader. Less a system to be understood, and more a way of seeing to be entered into. This copy of A Blue Fire has been with me for the best part of twenty years. It was one of the first ‘psychology’ books I owned, and it has lived a life. The cover is worn, the pages marked by time and
aphillipsarts
Apr 10, 20253 min read


Carl Jung on the Permeability of Psyche: Nature, Ancestry and the Living World
Carl Jung’s reflections from Bollingen reveal a psyche that is not confined to the individual but flows through nature, ancestry, and the deep roots of life. This expanded post explores Jung’s vision of the interconnectedness of self, soul, and the living world.
aphillipsarts
Apr 9, 20256 min read


The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Carl Jung and the Soul of Therapy
The First Encounter I discovered the work of Carl Jung during my mid-to-late teens, when I plucked this text from a shelf in a local bookshop. Having no idea at the time who this man was, or about psychoanalysis, I imagine I was attracted by the title. A Timely Passage in a Culture of Speed I find the following passage especially fascinating today, in a world where we are so often required to ‘know’ quickly. Alluding to a way of working that seeks not to impinge upon the...
aphillipsarts
Apr 9, 20256 min read
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