The pioneers in our field—Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Salvador Minuchin, and others—all recognized that they were providing something more than just technique. But does today’s short-term, empirically supported, manualized and medicalized psychotherapy really require its practitioners to be wise? Is wisdom even desirable?

It wasn’t their research results or bestselling books that set apart Freud, Rogers, Minuchin, and Satir. They seemed to have a sense of what really mattered. But today, have conceptions about clinical wisdom become obsolete?

There’s something about healing from the deep emotional suffering that feels like death and rebirth—not the quick kind that some claim to receive in religious conversion. It’s the kind that asks us to be open to changing our contract with life in the most fundamental way.

Excerpts from a series of interviews with some of the wisest souls in the field of psychology and psychotherapy on essential questions clinicians struggle with every day.

Networker movie critic and contributor Frank Pittman delighted in pointing out the follies, foibles, and excesses of the therapy world, especially anything he considered too trendy, sanctimonious, or politically correct.

Is “mentalization” a breakthrough in our understanding of the mind, or just a rehash of old ideas?

Healing from an extramarital affair is rarely a simple process, especially when embarrassing sexual secrets and incompatibilities are exposed.

Kenneth Hardy believes that the experience of trauma is too often unacknowledged by therapists struggling to help troubled minority youth.

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

In an encyclopedic new book, Andrew Solomon explores how parents and children forge emotional bonds with one another in the presence of sometimes vast inborn differences.

A man entering his sixties discovers some peculiar markers that signal a retreat from old oppositional habits.