San Francisco Magazine, March 1999

The New Face of Therapy

by Ethan Watters

Note: This is a sample of a long article, where many therapists were interviewed. This is the portion with Vladimir Huber’s comments.

Designer therapy may be a national trend, but nowhere has it reached such a crescendo as in the Bay Area. Vladimir Huber, a breathwork facilitator who has a Master’s in psychology and is completing his Ph.D. at the Institute of Imaginal Studies in Petaluma, recently moved to Northern California from Los Angeles because he felt the frontiers of therapy were being crossed here. «The cutting edge of psychology–the real innovation–is in the Bay Area,» says Huber, who combines counseling with teaching his patients new ways to breathe. «Sometimes therapists here get made fun of, but what’s happening here today will be taught in the more established psychology schools in ten years.»

For too long, therapists will tell you, they have been limited to the medical model in which an omnipotent doctor fixes the broken patient. The consensus is that the increasing variety of approaches, techniques, and philosophies used in therapy proves that the field is taking a holistic view of the patient as opposed to one that is «reductive» or «mechanistic, and this, they say, is a manifest good.