Alan C Tjelveit, London, Routledge, 1999, 336 pages, £17.99.

Ever since Thomas Szasz announced that mental illness was a myth and that psychiatric disorders were in fact moral dilemmas hiding beneath the shirt-tails of medicalisation, psychiatric ethics has been hotly debated, a debate given poignancy in the 1970s by the revelations of the abuse of psychiatry in Soviet Russia. However, discussion of ethical aspects of psychotherapy has lagged behind its psychiatric cousin, and it is mainly the emergence in the past decade or so of psychotherapy as a profession in its own right—and with it the need to develop professional codes of ethics—that has stimulated practitioners and their critics to take psychotherapeutic ethics seriously.

This book is one of the few devoted exclusively to the subject, and …