PYE, Jim
Jim Pye is a psychotherapist and writer. He works in a university, as a counsellor and adviser to mature students, and with recovering addicts for an agency in the voluntary sector. He has published two books – both with Oxford University Press.
Invisible Children (1989), is a vivid study of children who vanish from everyone’s radar in adolescence. They give no-one any trouble; they seem to slide through life with no-one noticing them, disguising themselves as unremarkable. Invisible Children was widely reviewed, The Independent publishing a half-page feature about the book….
Also published by Oxford University Press was Second Chances (1991), a series of short biographical accounts of people whose lives have been revolutionized by going back to education in adult life.
Researching for this book drew him towards psychotherapy, which, along with fatherhood, has occupied him intensively in recent years. He is now working on a book about psychotherapy, for the general as well as specialist reader. The book is about mature students, or “returners” – particularly interesting to work with in psychotherapy, because they are already trying to transform themselves. They go back to ‘school’ to start again; to find lost parts of themselves, or lost or stolen opportunities. The heart of the book will be case-histories of working with some of these often extraordinary people. Relatively unusual in the psychotherapy literature, the book will include the testimony of the subjects of the case-histories.
Pye is also co-editor of the Oxford Psychotherapy Society Bulletin, for which he writes papers and reviews. He has recently been part of a group setting up a low-cost counselling service for men.
Pye has also recently completed a novel, called Dark Cells, which is about the reversals and surprises and dangers of the relationship between client and therapist.