Review of Talking About Therapy (Hardcover)

This book of vignettes about people's experiences in and opinions about their own therapies was excellent...truly informative.As a therapist myself, I found it appealing and worth the read, especially with the people who were in therapy in the forties and fifties, because I don't hear enough of that perspective.I also liked the range of people and therapy types the book covered...though granted, it only covered a certain portion of those in therapy (i.e. entirely lacking any racially minority voices, said nothing about purely supportive therapy, didn't touch all the patients whose Medicaid pays for their therapy...).

The book's main drawback, however, was that its authors tried to make it into something it really wasn't...They tried to make it into a textbook or reference book of sorts, something more than just a collection of vignettes.They (ironically, like so many therapists) had to get in their own two cents constantly, and did it by fleshing everything out with theory, explanations, long-winded chapter and vignette introductions, summaries, recaps, expansions on themes, tepid historical insights...PURE DULLNESS, but moreso, unnecessary.Once I realized where the real power of the book lay, I just skipped over everything the authors had to say (or almost everything...at times they said an interesting thing or two about a famous therapist) and read the words of the people themselves, and worth it they were!

One last criticism:the authors feigned objectivity in describing different schools of therapy, but time and time again their stilted points of view seeped through.One example I can think of offhand was their explanation for why psychoanalysts are slow "to endorse" psychotropic medications:they said it was "because some of their patients have progressed without them and [because of their sometimes intolerable] side effects."While these may both be perfectly true reasons, they fail to mention the main reason I MYSELF don't endorse them - because, as Alice Miller says (and interestingly, her book Drama of the Gifted Child is mentioned glowingly several times in various vignettes), medications reduce symptoms, and symptoms provide the clue that allows people to trace emotionally their own traumas back into their childhoods...and thus heal.Medication lops off the symptom, gives temporary relief, but prevents deeper healing!



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