Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1578051614 ISBN 13: 9781578051618

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2009

Synopsis

In the 14 years since Sierra Club Books published Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner’s groundbreaking anthology, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, the editors of this new volume have often been asked: Where can I find out more about the psyche-world connection? How can I do hands-on work in this area? Ecotherapy was compiled to answer these and other urgent questions.

Ecotherapy, or applied ecopsychology, encompasses a broad range of nature-based methods of psychological healing, grounded in the crucial fact that people are inseparable from the rest of nature and nurtured by healthy interaction with the Earth. Leaders in the field, including Robert Greenway, and Mary Watkins, contribute essays that take into account the latest scientific understandings and the deepest indigenous wisdom. Other key thinkers, from Bill McKibben to Richard Louv to Joanna Macy, explore the links among ecotherapy, spiritual development, and restoring community.

As mental-health professionals find themselves challenged to provide hard evidence that their practices actually work, and as costs for traditional modes of psychotherapy rise rapidly out of sight, this book offers practitioners and interested lay readers alike a spectrum of safe, effective alternative approaches backed by a growing body of research.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Psychotherapist Buzzell and psychology professor Chalquist (Terrapsychologist) gather 29 contributors to explore traditional psychotherapy at the intersection of the human and the environment. This next-generation update of the Sierra Club's 1995 Ecopsychology finds one of the editors of that volume, Theodore Rosak, comparing society's "relentless pursuit of money" with Aztec "blood sacrifice," and urging all psychologists to challenge the prevailing ethos. Mary E. Gomes, another editor of Ecopsychology, considers an extention of the community circle to "all that lives and all that has left this world," treating lost species "as we would a friend, a family member, a beloved." Buzzell explores the precepts of ecotherapy (probing "human-nature" as well as "human-human" relationships) and its questions ("Are there animals in your life? Special environments where your heart opens and life feels right?"). Chalquist provides an overview of ecotherapy research while exploring the idea that a missing "psychology of homecoming" is the result of an artificial divide between "scientific knowledge" and "indigenous wisdom." Other sections explore ecotherapy in practice, helping couples bond to nature, treating animal trauma, and the healing methods of wilderness therapy.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1578051614
• ISBN 13: 9781578051618
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Buzzell Linda, Chalquist Craig