This book offers a new perspective on the working and potential healing of relations between persons and between peoples, relevant to our desperate times. Humans are born into relationships and personal selves emerge through experiences of relationship, which broaden and evolve through life. Inquiry into diversity and 'relations' within the self opens the way to other primary spheres: interpersonal and family relations, community process as relationship, the nature and far-reaching phenomena of loneliness and alienation, and organizational and big-system relations. One chapter maps the wide spectrum of inter-connected human systems, and another presents a view of helping theory and practice development extended through this spectrum. Over the whole range, the processes, healing and development of relationship are in central focus.

In a final review of the span of critical need and challenge, the book confronts alternatives and proposes steps toward recovery.