Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautifully crafted short stories, 23 Jul 2004
Dr Rubin's stories are drawn from her clinical practice and her experience with her patients. The reader meets Eve Gordon who endured a harrowing childhood with her alcoholic parents; now 39, she lives a life of virtual isolation and desperately wants to become her therapist's friend. Many sessions are spent with Eve curled up in the corner of the practice without uttering a single word. Bruce Marins, a cripple - a "Thalidomide baby", a drug taken by his mother to cure her morning sickness - who rejects sympathy as being patronising, who feels anger and distrust of people around him and who sees deceit, pity and rejection wherever he turns. As Dr Rubin is about to greet Bonnie Paulsen and Jerry Stillman in her office, she is far from picturing the way these two patients are going to deceive her with their egregious lies and carefully plotted hoax - "How easily any patient can defeat even the most artful and accomplished therapist." she writes! Jake Garvin suffers from manic-depressive psychosis and so needs help because he's having trouble writing his dissertation for his degree. This is all the more urgent since the two job offers Jake has received depend on his finishing his dissertation. A case which will unfortunately end very tragically. Richard Durbin and Valerie Goldner are a yuppie couple. But why does Richard stubbornly refuse to have a child with Valerie? What mysterious event in his past makes him refuse to become a father? And finally there is the case of Delfina Ortega, a Mexican American, who was pregnant at 16, then became an excellent high school student graduating near the top of her class, who was subsequently awarded full scholarship to the university and then, when she was accepted to a graduate programme in Latin American history, she falls into a panic attack. Dr Rubin's cases are a wonderful read for those of us who are mere laymen in the field of psychology.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thought-provoking stuff, 2 Oct 2005
This book looks at the way in which the therapist is transformed by the therapeutic process. It confronts head-on the prejudices of the therapist, and argues that the therapist has to become involved - there can be no detachment, because to be detached is to be inhuman. Instead constructive engagement and the supervision process is encouraged, with an awareness of how the individual therapist can grow and develop.
The book is warm, funny and uplifting, not just for therapists but for friends and acquaintances who seek to know others.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A valuable novel on the art of psychotherapy, 29 April 2007
In these case studies, the author reflects on the art of psychotherapy. She admits that if a therapist is to be effective, he has to enter the therapeutic encounter with the kind of humility that opens the possibility of a meaningful relationship between two people, both of whom struggle in their own ways to meet life's uncertainties. She also claims that she has never seen a person fit into any diagnostic category although the temptation to reach for a diagnosis - for something that promises to organize what feels like chaos - is a powerful one from which few therapists are immune. Confronting a patient is a process which forces the therapist to confront him/herself in unexpected and often difficult ways. The author says that she's learned over the years about the balance of giving and getting for therapist and patient, about anxieties and conflicts the therapeutic relationship can stir, about what it takes to manage these conflicts and how difficult it can be. She gives both patient and therapist a better understanding of the therapeutic process, its problems and possibilities.
Interestingly every therapist is drawn to the profession as much to deal with his own issues as with those of the people who sit in the other chair. Some patients tend to denigrate everything the therapists say. Some narcissistic patients tend to believe that their therapist is the smartest of all. The author believes that we leave therapy changed only in that we have a better understanding of who we are and how to deal with the troubled and troubling parts of ourselves. A successful therapy should thus leave the patient enabled to deal with the self in a new and more fruitful way.
Readers will learn that it is axiomatic that once the therapist has seen a couple together it is unwise to agree to see one of them for individual therapy, that sociopaths don't respond to therapy, that doing therapy is not a set of prescribed acts based on existing rules but rather a process which differs from patient to patient. Often the heart of neurotic problems is the conflict between our denied feelings and the attempt to dictate appropriate ones.
How does one cure life and the problems it throws up at us when we least expect them? How do we cure our existential angst over such things as loving, living and dying? How indeed can anyone cure us of whatever combination of life experience and inborn qualities went into making up who we are? The best therapy can do is to help us know ourselves better, to accept what we know, and give us the tools to change or moderate those parts of ourselves that hinder our ability to live, work and love productively.
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by Sue Gerhardt
by Robert de Board
by Eva Hoffman
by Irvin D. Yalom
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