How therapy explores reality

From The Rev David Ellington

Sir: It was unfortunate that Bryan Appleyard should have said at the end of an otherwise balanced article (3 May) that "therapy, like the cults, is religion gone wrong", thereby sweeping us all into the same pigeon- hole and contradicting his earlier, more sensible, observation that "within therapy there is a wide spectrum of respectability".

I was a very contented Church of England clergyman living in retirement when I chanced upon the Institute of Psychosynthesis and found them to be talking, in different language using different models, about concerns which have been central to me in a lifetime's practice of "religion", mainly, how to love one's neighbour as oneself? The difference between their - "psychotherapeutic" - approach and my - "religious" - one is that theirs has reached parts of me which my conventional religion did not even know were there, and so was not able to reach.

Yours realistically,

DAVID ELLINGTON

Ashley, Altrincham

3 May