My work is part of a tradition in psychology that shows the power of people’s beliefs. These may be beliefs we’re aware of or unaware of, but they strongly affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it. This tradition also shows how changing people’s beliefs - even the simplest beliefs - can have profound effects.

As Jungian analyst James Hillman remarked, “Psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognising that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets - the sickness is out there.

All this complexity and all the signifying layers don’t have to be a problem. They account for life’s richness. The trouble is, we are usually under the illusion that the world we encounter is a factual one having only one layer we call reality. If you follow the archetypal, essentially Platonic view, there is no reality, absolutely none, that is not colored every day by the living imagination. The therapist does not have the luxury to live and work under the illusion things are as they appear to be.

A passage from the poet Wallace Stevens (1989) has guided me for many years in my understanding of both religion and depth psychology: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly” (p. 189). These words are not as radical as they may sound at first. You just have to accept that everything we say is colored by the limits of our understanding, our emotional biases, and our hopes and wishes. Imagination shapes everything we say and think. Whenever we tell the stories of our lives, we are all novelists. In his book Healing Fiction, Hillman (1983) went further. He said that therapy offers the opportunity to opt into a better fiction, tell a more advanced story about your life.

A continuing practice of reading good therapists is an immeasurably useful way of gaining confidence in your work. For this book I read Jung, Hillman, Winnicott, Laing, Rogers, and Yalom. I restore my skills by consulting books and videos by Rollo May, Fritz Perls, John Tarrant, Ronald Schenk, Robert Sardello, D. W. Winnicott, Rafael López-Pedraza, Patricia Berry, David L. Miller, John Moriarty, and Nor Hall. I keep certain spiritual books at hand: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Tao Te Ching, Black Elk Speaks, Upanishads, Sufi poetry, Jane Hirshfield’s Women in Praise of the Sacred, and my own translation of the gospels. This is a partial list. I could add many poets and writers of fiction.