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

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.

The condition of this book tells a story, it has lived a life. A sign of its importance to me during the past decade, and no doubt beyond. In Crossing the Unknown Sea, David Whyte is drawing us towards a deeper and lasting shift in how we attend to our inner world of desires and dreams for a life well-lived, face the world and its demands, and truly engage in the conversational nature of reality. Pretending To Be Alive "We may do the same work and do it well, but we may do it

There are certain ideas that seem to sit just beneath the surface of modern life, recognised in fragments, but rarely given their full significance. Imagination is one of them. In Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Gary Lachman explores how imagination has been misunderstood, marginalised, and often reduced to something trivial or unreal within Western culture. What emerges instead is a very different picture. One in which imagination is not a secondary function of the mind,

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

"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 th

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