Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Hello! Welcome to a slightly longer book review section. The SEA stands in the spotlight with the self-publication of a first book in what could well become a series. Hot from the press, Dialogues on the Search for Meaning in Existential Therapy (by Spinelli and Buffardi) is reviewed in this issue. With its publication, the SEA intends to create a dialogue between a wider audience of existential therapists and writers, and cover a more extensive and novel range of topics. It may also turn you, reader, into a writer.

Another review is related to the participation of the SEA in national Creativity and Wellbeing Week, a festival that for the last eight years has been bringing together the arts, health and wellbeing. In 2018, around 35,000 people took part in hundreds of public events to learn and experience how the arts and creativity can improve health and wellbeing. The SEA organized a visit for ten psychotherapists and psychologists to the London studio of installation artist David Cotterrell. That this was actually the only event run by psychotherapists in the festival raised lots of questions. How do we make sense of this? Can our profession flourish in isolation from other practices? What are the risks of engaging in an inter-disciplinary experimental inquiry?

This section also contains five other reviews. They are headed up by Prideaux's engaging and sympathetic biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, I Am Dynamite. This is followed by a work mostly on his predecessor Kierkegaard, entitled The Existentialist's Survival Guide. It is a useful guide covering not just Kierkegaard's bewildering but lively works, but also some other existential thinkers. Existential Perspectives on Coaching moves us towards a pragmatic application of existential thought on coaching. It broadens the existential therapy landscape, and challenges some of its set beliefs. It is followed by a review of Happy City, which takes us into the urban landscape asking why some cities are so enjoyable and liveable, and others less so. It proposes essential lessons for the future living conditions of mankind. The review of the film A Ghost Story discusses the final reality that we will face one day – our death – and what our lives/deaths may mean once the living, who loved us, get on with their lives.

These thoughts of endings leave me here at the end of my introduction. Suffice it to write that I wish you good reading this summer.

Ondine Smulders