In the early 70s when I was training as a psychologist in Cardiff, I came across a strange and fascinating little book called She and Me by E.Graham Howe. The book spoke of the relationship between Non-duality and duality, and seemed to be mostly concerned with the question of opposites and the question of the soul. I can’t say that I understood much about it at that time in my life, but it remained in the background of my awareness and then later I across another book by the same author entitled The Mind of the Druid, whose 1989 edition carries an introduction by the head of the Ancient Druid Order David Loxley, which took the essential image of the druid and used it to explore similar themes. Later I learned that the author was a psychiatrist who had been influential in the development of psychotherapy in the UK, and was in fact one of the founders of the Tavistock Clinic when it was at its most radical and experimental. He was also the mentor to the radical and innovative psychotherapist R D Laing. In some ways much of the ideas were over my head at that stage in my life, and while I kept the two books and occasionally went back to them, I did not further investigate his work. In the 80s I trained in a form of body-based psychotherapy that also explored east-west spirituality, and this reminded me of some aspects of E.Graham Howe’s works, but it was not until 2012 that I commenced a serious study of it, when I came across a compendium of his work entitled The Druid of Harley Street.
