Schopenhauer’s Porcupines, by Deborah Luepnitz
How exactly is it that talking helps? Deborah Luepnitz explores this question throughout this now-classic collection of true stories of patients whom she saw long ago in therapy. The title of the book is a nod to the core of what psychotherapeutic conversation can help with: the dilemmas of intimacy, meaning the balancing of closeness and distance, love and hate, the fulfillment of desire and its frustration—kind of like porcupines trying to stay warm while not poking each other. In other words: life and love are complicated, and the specialized talking and listening of psychotherapy can help transform suffering into the inescapable porcupine dilemmas of everyday life.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb
Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb bookends her collection of stories of therapy with the story of her own therapy. Like any patient, Gottlieb comes to therapy wanting change but not wanting it; able to see a problem, or part of a problem, but unable or unwilling to look at other problems or parts of the problem. As patients talk and therapists listen, clues emerge about what may lie below the surface, and gradually the story becomes deeper, more flexible, more richly elaborated, more inclusive of a range of thoughts and feelings and wishes and fears, and more able to support the mourning of losses and the making of meaningful choices.
The Examined Life, by Stephen Grosz
A woman whose husband seems obviously to be having an affair, but who seems equally obviously determined not to notice. A man who, on his way to a celebration of a major professional achievement, manages almost deliberately to ruin the occasion by losing his wallet. A deeply troubled child who finds a way to enrage his otherwise composed therapist. These are among the people with whom psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has worked, and whose experiences form the basis of his reflections on change, loss, the desire to talk, to understand and be understood, and the art of listening to each other, to both the words and the silences.
Saving Talk Therapy, by Enrico Gnaulati
Empathy, genuine regard, acquired clinical wisdom, patience and attentiveness—these are the time-honored and scientifically-backed ingredients of effective psychotherapy. The average patient seeking to use his or her insurance gets something else: an in-and-out, crisis-management, symptom-reduction, solution-focused model of psychotherapy. Clinical psychologist Enrico Gnaulati writes about the economic interests of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries and the biased academic research that lead to the overvaluing of medications and quick-fix therapies in our culture. Along the way he describes the historical development of talk therapy and makes a case for in-depth, personally transformative psychotherapy that incorporates the benefits of research and medication without over-relying on them.
Sacred Therapy, by Estelle Frankel
As a young woman Estelle Frankel fell in love with Jewish mysticism and moved to Israel, where her journey led her into psychoanalysis and then back to the United States to study psychology. Now a psychotherapist and seasoned spiritual teacher, she has come to understand psychotherapy as a kind of spiritual midwifery, an art of gently encouraging and supporting people as they break out of their self-imposed limitations and give birth to their fullest selves. Her book is about the ways that Jewish spiritual teachings and healing practices can play a part in this, enhancing our lives and opening up new pathways to wholeness.
“One of therapy’s impossible tasks is to help build resources that make it possible to tolerate therapy.”