An essential feature of successful counselling is the ability to listen and respond well to the information being given in an interview. In this book, the author shows how this ability may take away the need for leading and advising, creating a counselling encounter that is constructive and helpful. Leaders, whether clerical or lay, teachers or managers, doctors or social workers, frequently see their role as one of communication, but in the excitement of communicating, forget that theirs are not the only important voices. The primary purpose of this book is to emphasize the necessity of learning to listen as well as to speak, and to respond to what is said and what is omitted.

Author Biography

Michael Jacobs was for many years Director of the counselling and psychotherapy courses in the Department of Adult Education, University of Leicester. In developing those courses he published a number of key texts which are used in other training courses - notably The Presenting Past (Open University Press, 2006, 3rd edition) and Psychodynamic Counselling in Action (Sage, 2010 4th edition). He has also written a number of other books (Sigmund Freud and D.W Winnicott in the Sage series) and edited three series for Open University Press - such as Core Concepts in Therapy. More recently he has written two books in the UKCP/Karnac series, Shakespeare on the Couch, and Our Desire of Unrest.