Cognitive-Analytic Therapy: Active Participation in Change: A New Integration in Brief Psychotherapy

by Anthony Ryle

Cognitive-Analytic Active Participation in Change A New Integration in Brief Psychotherapy Anthony Ryle, St Thomas’s Hospital, London With contributions from Amanda M Poynton, Guy’s Hospital, London and Bee J Brockman, West Midlands Regional Health Authority, Birmingham. This book presents a time-limited approach to psychotherapy. It describes a new framework for brief therapy—Cognitive - Analytic Therapy—the application of psychoanalytic understanding and of some psychoanalytic techniques within a framework, and with additional treatment methods derived from cognitive psychology and psychotherapy. This therapy involves a high degree of patient participation in the describing and in the learning to recognize and alter recurrent maladaptive procedures. The book is intended as a guide to clinical work—ideas and methods are illustrated with a large amount of case description, with writing from therapists and patients, and with some directly recorded material from sessions. Cognitive - Analytic Therapy is a precise and powerful method which uses active techniques, which recruits the patients’ capacities and which takes account of the complexity of psychotherapeutic change. The approach is brief, effective and researchable and is suitable as the first intervention in most patients. Anthony Ryle’s book will be essential reading to those already engaged in Cognitive - Analytic Therapy and will introduce many others to the possibility of an effective and theoretically coherent integration of psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioural therapies. This book appears in the Wily Series on Psychotherapy and Counselling, Series Editors Franz Epting, University of Florida, and Glenys Parry, University of Southampton.

282 pages, Paperback

First published February 9, 1990

About the author

Anthony Ryle was an English medical doctor and the developer of Cognitive Analytic Therapy (CAT) as well as Life President of The Association for Cognitive Analytic Therapy.

He was the nephew of philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

He studied at Oxford and University College Hospital, qualified in medicine in 1949. He worked as a General Practitioner in North London, then directed the University of Sussex Health service, and later worked as a Consultant Psychotherapist in St. Thomas' Hospital, London, from 1983 to 1992.

While in general practice he realised that a lot of his patients were presenting with psychological problems or distress, which he confirmed by epidemiological studies. He developed interest in psychotherapy and later developed a time limited therapy which can be offered in the UK's National Health Service. This type of therapy is known as cognitive analytic therapy.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a specialist book and I am not a therapist myself, and admire those who can handle it. This particular book is about the time limited therapy which is the most you can understandably hope to get on the NHS and how it works with different types of clients. There are useful intake questionnaires in the back of the book and descriptions of traps and snags. The author is I think quite rightly sceptical of traditional psychoanalysis, CAT requires more active participation by the client, but unlike modern coaches, the author acknowledges issues that arise out of transference. I felt this was an impressive author and book.