The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients Paperback – May 12, 2009
Author: Irvin Yalom | Language: English | ISBN: 0061719617 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients – May 12, 2009
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Review
“[Yalom’s] wise ideas are perfectly accessible.” (Publishers Weekly)
“An absorbing guide” (Boston Globe)
“An absorbing guide” (Boston Globe)
About the Author
Irvin D. Yalom, M.D., is the author of Love's Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life, Lying on the Couch, The Schopenhauer Cure, When Nietzsche Wept, as well as several classic textbooks on psychotherapy, including The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, considered the foremost work on group therapy. The Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University, he divides his practice between Palo Alto, where he lives, and San Francisco, California.
Books with free ebook downloads available The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients Paperback – May 12, 2009
- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial; 1 edition (May 12, 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0061719617
- ISBN-13: 978-0061719615
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Education & Training
- #9 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Psychotherapy, TA & NLP
- #10 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Counseling
Dr. Yalom is a good writer and offers a unique perspective here on his decades of work in psychotherapy. It's definitely thought-provoking reading, and very easy to follow.
But it left me with questions for the author (and some serious reservations)--never a good feeling at the end of a book.
On the one hand, I appreciate that his training was to remain distant from patients where, as he described it, even helping an elderly woman put on a coat would be frowned on. I appreciate that, through experience with real-life patients, he realized the importance of establishing warmth, an interpersonal connection, a -human- relationship with patients rather than a distant "psychiatrist-as-remote-God-like" figure.
However, reading many of the chapters here, I couldn't help but think some of the therapy methods he describes could be too intimate and too seductive with his patients. I kept feeling that it would be very easy to act like this and wind up crossing the line--or being misunderstood--in a therapy setting. Sexual attraction (and, as he says, even unconsummated love that is mutually felt) is a recurrent theme in so many stories he shares from his practice.
There seemed to me to be much too much emphasis on talking about the therapist-patient relationship each week. Dr. Yalom writes, over and over, that he realizes he is far more important to his patients, personally, than they are to him. And yet he also seemed to intentionally intensify their feelings for him in the course of therapy, giving example after example of how he pushed them to share dreams about him, fantasies about him, etc.
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