Psychotherapy is often presented as a set of techniques for solving problems, changing thoughts, or managing symptoms. Entwined Selves offers a different vision. Drawing on phenomenology, hermeneutics, and decades of professional practice, James Costello and Niall Keane develop a radically relational account of psychotherapy grounded in encounter rather than explanation.

Distinctive in bringing psychotherapy and philosophy into sustained dialogue, the book argues that understanding emerges between people through presence, dialogue, restraint, and interpretation rather than through the application of technique.

Challenging procedural and manualised models of therapy, it offers therapists, counsellors, students, and scholars an original and accessible account of therapeutic encounter as an embodied, ethical, and relational event.

James Costello is a psychotherapist and Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England. He is the author of Workplace Wellbeing: A Relational Approach (Routledge, 2020) and Philosophical Foundations of Psychotherapy: Radical Relationality (Routledge, 2025).

Niall Keane is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. He is Joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.