Description:
In Beyond Therapy, Erving Polster examines the role of "life focus" in three of society's most familiar activities: ordinary conversation, the arts, and religion
Brief description:
Erving Polster is the director of The Gestalt Training Center, San Diego, and the author of Gestalt Therapy Integrated, Every Person's Life is Worth a Novel, and From the Radical Center: The Heart of Gestalt Therapy.
Review Quotes:
"With his usual enchanting prose, Erv Polster inspires clinicians to take our talents into our communities and establish a tradition that supports people to narrate their lives to each other in "life focus groups." He has long encouraged such focused narrations as one of life's finest riches. Now he gives us examples, ideas and suggestions to go along with his inspirational impetus."
--Lynne Jacobs, Licensed Psychologist, Co-Founder of the Pacific Gestalt Institute
"With infectious optimism and soulful humanism, Dr. Erving Polster has shared his inspiring vision of the extraordinary things people can achieve through powerful social connections that encourage meaningful self-examination. Dr. Polster's concept of "Life Focus Community" is rich with the potential to provide us with the support, insight, and personal growth to satisfy the need we all have to build our lives more thoughtfully and skillfully. Read this important book and join the growing community of those who are better people for having done so."
--Michael D. Yapko, clinical psychologist and author of Depression is Contagious
"He [Polster] challenges therapists to stretch beyond the therapy room and engage the community at large. He shows how a lifetime of support, witness and sharing can be an anchor for sharing life experiences. Polster offers excellent suggestions of topics for a life focus group. . . . Polster's illustrations and case examples of life solution group members' experiences inspire us to think of undiscovered stories from our own lives with a new appreciation. He takes the best of what therapy brings to the client--attention, attunement, focus, and connectivity-- and shows how these can be used in a larger community experience over the course of a lifetime."
--Victoria Danzig, L.C.S.W., Voices