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Lying on the Couch: A Novel
Books: Text Books: Psychotherapy: Item 3
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Lying on the Couch: A Novelby Irvin D. Yalom
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful: THE TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, March 15, 2000 Reviewer:Naomi Williams "aka dragonmama" (Santa Rosa, CA United States) - I'm not particularly interested in psychotherapy, so I wasn't thrilled when my book club picked this to read. I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it immensely. Therapist Ernest Lash decides to try an experiment: having a completely open and honest relationship with a new patient. Little does he know what effect this will have on him, his patient, and the people who know them. The chain-reaction that follows is amazing and entertaining. This book is great testimony to the power of honesty and integrity.
Product Review
There is plenty of lying going on in psychotherapy offices to be found in Irvin D. Yalom's novel Lying on the Couch, and the lying is of every type defined in your average modern dictionary. Among those doing the lying are Carolyn, who hopes to ruin the career of psychotherapist Ernest Lash because she believes his advice led her husband to seek a divorce. Then there is the gambler whose plan is to lure another psychotherapist into malpractice so he can sue and pay off his debts. In Yalom's world, the relationship between therapist and patient is a tricky one indeed, and it's sometimes hard to tell who needs advice and counseling more--the patient lying on the couch or therapist sitting nearby. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
A willingness to confess to his various mistakes in the course of treating patients made Dr. Yalom's 1989 nonfiction bestseller, Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, endearing, but one hopes that this satire of the Bay Area psychiatric industry is not another mea culpa in disguise. The two psychiatrists at the center of Yalom's second novel (after When Nietzsche Wept) find themselves entangled in situations for which their clinical training could not have prepared them. Dr. Ernest Lash, who is, in fact, extremely earnest and given to wearing earth shoes and stained ties, decides to experiment with a new, more intimate therapeutic approach, unwittingly playing into the hands of Carol Leftman, a patient determined to ruin his professional reputation because he had encouraged her husband to leave her. Meanwhile, Ernest's former supervisor, the ambitious, self-important Dr. Marshal Streider, is fleeced by a charismatic con man masquerading as a patient. For help, Marshal turns to a lawyer?the very same Carol Leftman who's dogging Ernest. For both Marshal and Ernest, then, the absolute honesty they demand during the therapeutic hour is at odds with the professional ethic of confidentiality that binds both lawyers and shrinks. Yalom is exploring the jungles of what Ernest calls "wildcat therapy," in which therapists are unable to maintain the Olympian mantle of clinical disinterest in encounters with their patients. Whether this is good medicine or not, Yalom doesn't quite say. As absorbing as it is, the novel presents the moral or professional blunders of the analysts as the acceptable price of doing business. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour; Rights: William Morris Agency.
Copyright 1996 Reed business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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