An old man with a shaggy white beard and matching hair stands in front of an audience of seekers and flower children. They are looking for ways of amplifying their human potential, of becoming more aware of their sense perceptions. It’s the tail end of the 1960s and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is where it’s happening.

Throughout the decade, the fame of Fritz Perls – founder of Gestalt therapy in the 50s along with his rarely mentioned wife, Laura, and the once-lauded social critic Paul Goodman – soared. Perls’s so-called Gestalt Prayer was doing the rounds: “I do my thing and you do your thing, / I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, / and you are not in this world to live up to mine. / You are you, and I am I, / and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. / If not, it can’t be helped.” (Even by this time Gestalt had lost its intellectual oomph, having moved away from its earlier therapeutic intent into the world of yogis and platitudes.)

When he was a student in Vienna in the late 20s, Perls had attended Wilhelm Reich’s “technical seminars”. Reich, who wrote The Function of the Orgasm in 1927, was to serve as his supervising analyst in Berlin in 1930. The book was dedicated and personally presented to Freud, who liked the talented Reich: he had done much good work in the outpatient Ambulatorium, providing therapy for the poor, and then with his mobile clinic bringing advice and contraception to working-class areas. But, as Freud wrote to a friend with his customary dryness, Reich had somewhat oversimplified the human psyche by finding the antidote for all neurosis in one genital function.

Perls would later tell an anecdote about his one meeting with the founder of psychoanalysis and the talking therapy that predated his own. It’s 1936 and Perls pays an impromptu visit to the ageing Freud at his apartment, announcing he’s come all the way from South Africa. Freud, unimpressed by the presumptuous interruption, asks: “And when are you going back?”

Perls and Reich are not part of the same chapter in Frank Tallis’s genial book, in which he sets out to familiarise the reader with thinkers (almost all male here) in the psychotherapeutic tradition. This is because he orders the many voices in The Act of Living neither chronologically nor according to particular schools of thought, but according to the various ways psychotherapy has addressed the difficulties of living a “fulfilling” life.

Humans have complex needs, he writes. “We need to talk, to be understood, to have a cohesive sense of self, to have insight, to be loved, to feel safe, to satisfy biological appetites, to resolve inner conflicts, to be accepted, to overcome adversity, to have purpose, to find meaning and to accept our own mortality.”

Tallis has set himself a daunting task, but this catalogue of needs explains why Perls is handled in an early section to do with talk, while Reich comes on the scene later, with the discussion of sex. It also explains how a single book can contain so much. Among its subjects are inkblot tests, cognitive behavioural therapy, Hans Eysenck’s notorious IQ tests, ECT regimens, the discredited treatments of William Sargant, RD Laing and evolutionary psychology.

Tallis also reflects on a number of paintings by Edward Hopper, in particular the famous Automat, with its solitary female figure, lonely against the city night. Finally, there are snippets of case histories culled from his own years as a practising clinical psychologist. These are evocative and sometimes read like scenes from Tallis’s crime fiction sequence set in 1900s Vienna, The Liebermann Papers. (Liebermann, his hero, is a student of Freud.)

Sarah is a young woman on a locked ward. She won’t speak or eat much of anything, hardly moves and shows no response to others. She is suffering from whatever the diagnostic terms depression and anorexia both signify and hide and has not responded to treatment. In reading her hospital notes, Tallis learns that she is a talented mathematician and pianist. He decides to bring a stereo system into her room and fills the air with Mozart. Sarah begins to sob and continues to do so through several piano sonatas. This response marks the beginning of a long therapeutic process through which she regains some sense of the meaning life can still hold for her after the disillusionment her perception of injustice in the world had brought.

In his last chapter Tallis dwells on Freud’s difficult final year, 1938-39 – in London, where the flight from Nazi terror had landed him. Freud’s ideas have been present throughout the book, but at the last, it is his stoical resignation that Tallis values – his acceptance of pain and death, while all the time maintaining a vivid interest in life.

Tallis’s premise in the book is that, although many people can name a number of philosophers, few are familiar with any psychotherapeutic thinkers apart from Freud. We live in an era of widespread mental illness, in which, as Tallis claims, more people take their own lives worldwide than perish from war and terrorism, in which the provision of proper treatment in the UK has become impossible because of the sheer number of people with mental health problems, and in which so many people are in therapy. So why aren’t the great psychologists better known?

Inadvertently he provides something of an explanation. Only a small number in the canon of psychoanalysts – Freud and Donald Winnicott among them – are particularly interesting thinkers, let alone writers, whatever the efficacy of their recommended treatments. The few engaging psychoanalytic writers that are alive today, such as the British psychotherapist Adam Phillips and a number of French thinkers, don’t get a mention here.

Psychology and psychotherapy are applied disciplines, the theories of which are most often examined in universities and specialised institutes. Always excepting Freud, the need Tallis identifies in his subtitle – “Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety” – is probably better met by reading fiction, philosophy and poetry than by, say, deciphering the protocols of rapid eye movement therapy.

• The Act of Living: What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Surviving Discontent in an Age of Anxiety is published by Little, Brown (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.