Psychopathological phenomenology and existential psychotherapy may help us overcome the challenges of integrating the different dimensions of mental illness and developing new treatments. Better characterization of symptoms/syndromes can improve classification and causal modelling, whereas existential psychotherapy has added to our understanding of the influence of our position in the world and in history.

Motivational interviewing has many similarities to VBP. It can increase the person’s agency by drawing out personal meaning and the importance of change. A crucial insight from it is that saying out loud what our values are can greatly enhance our understanding of them. Treatment may mean reducing conflict between the person’s core values by helping the person recognize their environment’s affordances more efficiently or improve their sense-making and thereby alter their values.

Psychiatry has been pioneering in embracing alternative meanings of recovery. The most important consequence of this was that it enabled discussions about recovery as living well with mental ill-health. Co-production has helped to reframe and enhance the relationship between ‘doctor’ and ‘patient’, leading to better outcomes for all.

Recovery together with co-production will enable constructive partnerships between all those affected by mental ill-health to play their part in progressive psychiatry and more progressive communities.

This chapter describes families of relationship- and emotion-focused therapies, whose members include psychoanalytic, psychodynamic and humanistic treatments. It begins with Freud’s traditional psychoanalysis, which stresses the need for clients to develop insight into their primitive drives, unconscious conflicts, and patterns of relating. It next covers other psychodynamic approaches that share ideas with traditional psychoanalysis, including interpersonal therapy. It also describes humanistic treatments, including person-centered, Gestalt, and existential therapies, all of which emphasize each client’s unique way of experiencing the world. Psychodynamic and humanistic treatments are considered relational approaches because they place strong emphasis on the role of the therapeutic relationship in treatment. The chapter also describes other treatments such as motivational interviewing and emotion-focused therapy that emphasize the role of emotion and interpersonal relationships in helping clients overcome psychological problems.