Psi and Psychotherapy

The well-known and highly successful psychic Alex Tanous died in 1990, so this book written with his medical collaborators has been on ice for nearly three decades. The book initially describes their meeting and the development of a combined approach to mental health by a psychic and psychiatrist, where the basic principle is that genetic/childhood experiences are the primary continuous source of influence on a person. The process is rigorously structured in terms of dimensions, focus, goals and evaluation, with three distinct phases. Tanous already had a track record as a healer before the detailed cases described in this book. His insights are extraordinary, to say the least, and totally specific to the patient involved, for instance in one case identifying the key childhood incident relating to a weight control issue, and in another a connection with fear of being attacked, tracing this back to seeing her father peering at her through the window, again aged eight. The treatment and evaluation are described in all cases and provide a new avenue for collaboration, which may now be more acceptable than it would have been in the 1980s, given the opening to spirituality.