John Marzillier, PhD
John Marzillier MA, MSc, PhD is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist living in Oxford, England. In a long career he worked as an academic psychologist, a clinician and a private practitioner in psychotherapy. He trained in behavioural, cognitive, cognitive-analytic and psychodynamic therapies, a professional journey that he describes in his personal memoir, The Gossamer Thread. My Life as a Psychotherapist published by Karnac Books in 2010. He has retired from his psychotherapy practice to work as a writer. As well as continuing to write about psychotherapy, John writes fiction and poetry. In 2002 he was awarded a MA in Creative Writing by Bath Spa University College. A selection of his poetry can be found on www.oxfordpoetrygroup.com. He is currently writing a book on people’s responses to major trauma based on recorded interviews with trauma survivors. John’s website can be found on www.johnmarzillier.com.
By John Marzillier, PhD
on 6/3/12 - 9:01 PM
“I was okay until I met you!” she said and slammed the door of my office as she left. I have never forgotten that moment. I was shocked, not just by the vehemence, her incandescent anger, but by my complete failure to anticipate her reaction. I thought I was a good judge of character and I had got this woman badly wrong. I had invited her husband to attend the previous session and, instead of supporting her jibes and scarcely...
By John Marzillier, PhD
on 7/27/11 - 1:50 PM
In my memoir, The Gossamer Thread: My Life as a Psychotherapist, I describe my treatment of ‘Angie’, a young mother with horrific fantasies of killing her two young children by stabbing them through the heart with a kitchen knife. It was back in the 1980s and I was in the process of shedding my old behaviour therapy skin, realising I needed to listen to the client more carefully before embarking on any specific intervention. My therapy was a success, or...