Counselling and psychotherapy are effective to the extent that they promote the creativity of clients and patients. Creativity is both a lifestyle and a health resource. A creative lifestyle implies learning to be the authors of our own lives and a creative approach to our inner lives and our social environment gives us coherence and authenticity. This book derives creative principles for counselling and psychotherapy from practical modern approaches in these fields, as well as from psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, and new concepts of creativity itself. The creative attitude central to this represents an integrative basis for the differential application of various counselling and treatment techniques. Creative counselling serves to assist in coping with distress and clearly defined conflicts, and encourages personal and professional development. Creative psychotherapy is an aspect of dynamic, analytic and integrative psychotherapy. The hermeneutic principles – memory, narrative shaping, interactional experience – are activated with a view to ridding patients of psychopathological symptoms. In the modern world with all its challenges, creative counselling and psychotherapy are of outstanding importance. The book outlines a readily understandable, vital, and creative approach to the practice of counselling and psychotherapy in the service of the development of personal and social creativity.

Foreword -- Introduction and overview -- Creativity -- Three examples of counselling and psychotherapy -- Hermeneutics: the art of creative understanding and life management -- Aesthetic experience and shaping of reality -- Creative principles of psychotherapy -- Creative principles of counselling and coaching -- The creative aspect of brief dynamic psychotherapy -- The creative aspect of psychoanalysis -- Indications and counter-indications for the creative attitude -- Professional and “ordinary” relationships -- Ethical implications -- Artistic shaping and resolution of psychic conflicts -- Summary