Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Perennial Classics) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book should be required reading for anybody either undergoing psychotherapy or providing it. Irvin Yalom uses his experience with ten clients to illustrate how people change in therapy. Sometimes the change comes out of brilliant insights, sometimes it comes from the therapist's mistakes. Either way, Yalom's integrity in relating these vignettes helps the reader understand the process better.
If you're not in therapy, perhaps this book will help you understand yourself and your internal processes a bit better. Which of Yalom's patients do you identify with? Which to you totally reject? Either of those patients, and Yalom's treatment of them, has something to teach you.
If you are in therapy, notice how Yalom treats his patients, how he thinks about them. How does this compare to your relationship with your therapist? Do you experience the same challenges, the same caring, the same dynamic? Or do you just show up and whine for an hour?
As a therapist, I found Yalom's work particularly brave. Who would write a book about their mistakes? Yet, from his mistakes, I find myself learning--and also better enabled to learn from my mistakes. Reading Love's Executioner helped to keep me from sitting on that God-like Throne and remember to be a human being with my clients; a fellow sufferer, an ally in the healing process.
And if the idea of therapy seems not to apply to you, then you may simply find this book a fascinating story about how a thoughtful and insightful man deals with the sorrows, wounds, and needs of other human beings. These stories impart a powerful understanding of human relationships, whether you're involved in therapy or not.
Five stars for candor and courage. Five stars for a sharp writing style that holds attention better than most "case studies," and five stars for choosing stories that speak to the depths of people's hearts.
(If you'd like to discuss this book or review, click on the link above to drop me an email. Thanks!)

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Thoughts Without A Thinker: Psychotherapy From A Buddhist Perspective Review

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(More customer reviews)A friend loaned me this book, and from the notes in its margins, it looks like it has passed through many hands before mine. "It's Epstein's best book," my friend explained, "and it changed my life." Mark Epstein is a graduate of Harvard Medical School, and this book is his result of twenty years' experience in both Western psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation (p. x).
In the Dalai Lama's Foreward to Epstein's 1995 book, and in his own more recent books including THE ART OF HAPPINESS (1998), STAGES OF MEDITATION (2001), and AN OPEN HEART (2001), he tells us the "purpose of life is to be happy" (p. ix). However, as Epstein reveals in his insightful book, clinging to the self causes suffering. Whereas attachment, aversion, delusion, and faulty perceptions not only cause suffering, they also offer the potential for "release" (p. 16). "We are locked into our minds," Epstein writes, "but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float" (p. 17). (Perhaps this is what my own Zen teacher meant when he once told me that I "think too much.")
To find enlightenment, the Buddha encouraged us to become as lamps unto ourselves (p. 40), and Dogen observed that, "to study Buddhism is to study the self" (p. 20). This is also the premise of THOUGHTS WITHOUT A THINKER. Epstein has organized his book into three parts, the Buddhist psychology of mind (pp. 11-102), meditation (pp. 103-155), and therapy (pp. 157-222). In Part I, he demonstrates how Buddhist teachings are the key to understanding the psychology of mind (p. 41), and how those teachings are "less about religion (in the Western sense) than they are a vision of reality containing a practical blueprint for psychological relief" (p. 45). In Part II, Epstein examines the basic Buddhist meditation practice of "bare attention." Meditation, he explains, promotes the therapeutic goals of integration, humility, stability and self awareness (p. 129). In Part III, using non-technical terminology, Epstein integrates Freud's practice of psychotherapy into Buddhist teachings. In the end, Epstein's book is not so much a "feel-good" book about finding happiness in our lives, as a feel-real book well worth reading.
G. Merritt

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Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life Review

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(More customer reviews)If you are a trauma survivor -- especially if you are just beginning to deal with your trauma and symptoms -- please read this book.
This is, finally, the book I've been looking for and really needed a year or two ago when I first started dealing directly with my trauma history and its affects on my life! I recommend this whole heartedly as a great resource for survivors and their loved ones. It is the best general guide to the subject that I have read.
I have read most of the other books folks typically recommend, and usually found them interesting and helpful. At the same time, I felt like they were either to detailed and technical (Levine, Herman, Rothschild, etc.) to really be practical. Or, they had too many exercises, reflections, and inspirational quotes for me (The Courage to Heal and its kindred) and I found them a bit too sappy and off-putting for where I was in my process.
In this book, Cori strikes just the right balance of information, suggestions, and tone. She also does a wonderful job of summarizing what trauma is, how it affects the body and mind, what therapeutic methods can be helpful, and how to generally care for oneself through the healing process. She also provides tools for self-reflection, and intersperses stories from other survivors that make the data relevant and come to life.
If this book had been available when I started dealing with my trauma, I think I would have understood the situation better and would have been more equipped to make good choices and deal with things in a caring and effective way.
While this is clearly a sort of overview or handbook, Cori provides plenty of additional references and resources so you can do further investigating on your own.
My one small quibble (and it's is very small), is that she only mentions meditation and mindfulness practices in passing. I have found these practices to be essential to my healing. But I recognize that they are a bit outside the mainstream, and certainly aren't for everyone.
Overall, a wonderful resource!

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The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy Review

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(More customer reviews)Frankl's logotherapy enables people to once again discover the quality of life. Frankl believes that the first two schools of Viennese psychotherapy (Freud and Adler), which he calls the depth psychology, must be complimented the logotherapy - the height psychology. His therapy explores man's future instead of his past. Summarizing the Freudian concept as the will to pleasure and the Adlerian concept as the will to power, Frankl points out that man's basic motivation in life is neither pleasure nor power. Each person lives to discover the meaning of life and thereby to fulfill it - the will to meaning. Life is too meaningful for man to comprehend: it is essentially incomprehensible because it lies on a higher realm than that of man's. During the World War 2, Frankl survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz. In the camps, most of the inmates despaired that if they did not survive the camp, there was no meaning in suffering. Frankl, on the other hand, believed that if there was no meaning in suffering, there was no point in surviving the camp. In other words, the meaning of life was either unconditional regardless of the situation one was facing, or it was none at all. In the camps, Frankl would console his inmates telling them, "Someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours ?a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead ?and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly ?not miserably ?knowing how to die.? He would explain to them that it was not them asking the meaning of life. It was life asking them the meaning, and they had to answer to it. What Frankl witnessed in the camps contradicted Freud's theory that if people were left without food for few days, their wants would be reduced to the common desire for food. While some inmates behaved according to their instincts, as Freud predicted, there were also others who lived up to this challenge. Frankl witnessed people who gave away their last piece of bread and others who organized religious activities, which resulted in execution if they were caught. One of logotherapy's techniques to help people discover values is to have them imagine their lives from their deathbeds and look back on them. During such exercises people often find that their current definition of success differs significantly from that on their deathbeds. They realize that they do not wish they had made more money, had more sex. It is interesting to note that virtually everyone points to relationship as their most cherished value. They wish that they had spent more time with people they care about. Logotherapy bases its therapy on the fact that man is a self-transcendent being. Psychotherapy which views man as a self-contained being is bound to fail. Frankl's favourite analogy regarding this matter is the eye. The function of the eye is to transcend itself: healthy eye does not see itself. The more it self-transcends, the more it actualizes itself. Only when there is a problem, such as glaucoma, does it notice itself. Man actualizes himself in the same way. Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendent. Man is most human when he is occupied with something other than himself - when he is serving others?needs. The best time to take a picture of man is when he is least conscious of himself. How unnatural the picture looks when he is told to say cheese, to notice himself. Man neither lives by himself nor for himself. Man who views himself as a self-contained being is bound to live in despair. If he were to weigh the suffering and joy in life, he will find that the suffering outweighs by far. Every approach to suicide prevention needs to be grounded on the irreducibility of the unique human phenomenons and the self-transcendent nature of man. Only then can he find the meaning in suffering and thereby meet the challenge. He then realizes that life expects something from him in every situation. This "mere?realization in itself may even put an end to suicidal thoughts. Painting green the leaves of a dying tree lasts only so long, while watering its roots naturally turns them green.Frankl warns us of the serious consequences of reductionism. And his logotherapy thoroughly deestablishes the reductionism in psychotherapy and reinstitutes the human realm in psychotherapy. Logotherapy has a significant contribution to make in our world where more and more people are seeking psychotherapy to address this human realm. Logotherapy, then, is a psychotherapy for the man in the street ?all of us.

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Emphasizing spiritual values and the quest for meaning in life in its approach to the neurotic behavior, by the founder of logotherapy.

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