Book Reviews

In this issue a wide variety of topics are visited. Readers accustomed to Heidegger as rather abstract with tenuous links to everyday life will be able to read about the application of his thinking to work-based studies. There are also reviews of books that help us to think about what we mean by existential development throughout the life span, one on the nature of maternal love, another drawing on attachment theory, practice and research, and another much more autobiographical account of what has become known rather ambiguously as 'middle-age', although quite what it is in the middle of is not so clear. Staying loosely with the autobiographical we have a review of a book that makes quite explicit use of literature in therapeutic practice. Which leads us on to therapeutic practice covered in three rather different ways, one more predictably, continuing the consideration of the relevance of CBT to existential practice, another which places ethics in the centre of the therapeutic relationship, and lastly a rather more unusual book by a prolific US writer largely unknown in the UK, that brings us full circle and links the autobiographical, the practical and the ethical in a discussion of the relationship between truth and lies in therapy.

Heidegger's Contribution to the Understanding of Work-Based Studies

Paul Gibbs. (2011). London: Springer.

In this book, Paul Gibbs applies Heidegger's work to his own professional field of interest, namely, work-based learning and education. In order to move on to highlight aspects of the book that I feel are more interesting and hopefully more relevant to therapy, however, I need to immediately raise one concern that I have with it. There are some very basic errors in spelling in the text, which I am sure can be pushed to one side and explained as typographical errors. I cite here only one example of what I mean, namely the heading for chapter 12, which has in its title 'phenemological' instead of 'phenomenological'.

The 154 pages that comprise this work are arranged in 13 chapters, and divided into two parts. Part One attends to the context, as Gibbs sets it out, exploring the field of work and the workplace using Heidegger's philosophy. Particular attention is given to bringing out an understanding of the role and place of the employee, with reference to Marcuse, Arendt and Jünger as well as Heidegger. Part Two, however, moves to issues that bear on the study of work-based studies, as well as other themes that the author seems to feel are pertinent to the domain of work, such as learning, our technological way of being and consumerism, time and the