Explores Yalom’s profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature. A distinguished psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Irvin D. Yalom is also the United States’ most well-known author of psychotherapy tales. His first volume of essays, Love’s Executioner, became an immediate best seller, and his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, continues to enjoy critical and popular success. Yalom has created a subgenre of literature, the “therapy story,” where the therapist learns as much as, if not more than, the patient; where therapy never proceeds as expected; and where the therapist’s apparent failure proves ultimately to be a success. Writing the Talking Cure is the first book to explore all of Yalom’s major writings. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Jeffrey Berman comments on Yalom’s profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature and emphasizes the recurrent ideas that unify his writings: the importance of the therapeutic relationship, therapist transparency, here-and-now therapy, the prevalence of death anxiety, reciprocal healing, and the idea of the wounded healer. Throughout, Berman discusses what Yalom can teach therapists in particular and the common (and uncommon) reader in general. “As a psychiatrist who has benefitted enormously not only from Yalom’s writings but also from his mentorship, I admire Berman’s relationship to his subject. They both write lucidly and imaginatively, inviting the reader to accompany them on a personal journey that is intriguing but intellectually rigorous. Reading this book helps me to better understand Yalom’s dual roles—as brilliant psychotherapist/teacher and compelling novelist. Berman’s book-by-book examination of Yalom’s work illustrates how good therapy involves facing reality, and good fiction involves making stories come alive by resonating with the hard truths of life. He is the perfect guide to Yalom, capturing his wisdom and creativity with respect and clarity.” — David Spiegel, author of Living Beyond Limits: New Hope and Help for Facing Life-Threatening Illness “This is a convincing celebration of and commentary on one of the most prominent psychotherapists of the last century. For anyone interested in the popularization of an idiosyncratic form of existential psychotherapy for individuals and groups, this will be an important book.” — Murray Schwartz, Emerson College “In this richly textured book, Berman takes us backstage in a warm and skillful exploration of Irvin Yalom’s unmatched contributions as a psychotherapist, author, and educator. We are provided a transparent view of how human healing emerges from our talking, writing, and reading. Berman reminds us eloquently that psychotherapy is, at its essence, the process of human connection and the joint attribution of meaning to experience.” — Molyn Leszcz, The University of Toronto

Vaughan, Susan C., M.D. Many therapists and their patients find that the traditional talking therapy still offers the best hope for long-term relief from depression and other psychological ailments. This is especially true for people who worry about the side effects of Prozac and other similar drugs. Now Dr. Susan Vaughan offers compelling evidence, based on new scientific research, that the process of talking with a trained therapist actually alters the way the brain's neurons are connected and effects permanent, positive changes in how we interact with the world. Dr. Vaughan interweaves stories from therapy sessions with cutting-edge research results. She shows how interpreting dreams, free-associating, and attention to childhood experiences have an impact on the structure of our brain. Anyone who, for one reason or another, questions the value of long-term drug therapy will welcome the alternative approach presented here.

'Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.' Carl Jung The essence of successful therapy is the relationship, a dance of growing trust and understanding between the therapist and the patient. It is an intimate, messy, often surprising and sometimes confusing business - but when it works, it's life-changing. Gill Straker and Jacqui Winship, two esteemed Sydney-based psychotherapists, bring us nine inspiring stories of transformation. They introduce us to their clients, fictional amalgams of real-life cases, and reveal how the art of talking and listening helps us understand deep-seated issues that profoundly influence who we are in the world and how we see ourselves in relation to others. We come to understand that the transformative power of the therapeutic relationship can be replicated in our everyday lives by the simple practice of paying attention and being present with those we love. Whether you have experienced therapy (or are tempted to try it), or you are just intrigued by the possibilities of a little-understood but transformative process, this wise and compassionate book will deepen your understanding of what it is to be open to connection - and your appreciation that to be human is to be a little bit mad.

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Psychotherapy across distance and time, from Freud’s treatments by mail to crisis hotlines, radio call-ins, chatbots, and Zoom sessions. Therapy has long understood itself as taking place in a room, with two (or more) people engaged in person-to-person conversation. And yet, starting with Freud’s treatments by mail, psychotherapy has operated through multiple communication technologies and media. These have included advice columns, radio broadcasts, crisis hotlines, video, personal computers, and mobile phones; the therapists (broadly defined) can be professional or untrained, strangers or chatbots. In The Distance Cure, Hannah Zeavin proposes a reconfiguration of the traditional therapeutic dyad of therapist and patient as a triad: therapist, patient, and communication technology. Zeavin tracks the history of teletherapy (understood as a therapeutic interaction over distance) and its metamorphosis from a model of cure to one of contingent help. She describes its initial use in ongoing care, its role in crisis intervention and symptom management, and our pandemic-mandated reliance on regular Zoom sessions. Her account of the “distanced intimacy” of the therapeutic relationship offers a powerful rejoinder to the notion that contact across distance (or screens) is always less useful, or useless, to the person seeking therapeutic treatment or connection. At the same time, these modes of care can quickly become a backdoor for surveillance and disrupt ethical standards important to the therapeutic relationship. The history of the conventional therapeutic scenario cannot be told in isolation from its shadow form, teletherapy. Therapy, Zeavin tells us, was never just a “talking cure”; it has always been a communication cure.

In The Writing Cure, Emma Lieber tells the story of her decade-long analysis, and her becoming a psychoanalyst, by tracing dreams, scenes, and signifiers that emerged from her analysis while also undertaking critical explorations of works of psychoanalytic theory and literary texts. The Writing Cure thus articulates what psychoanalysis does for its patients by writing the moment of its termination in real time, performing the convergence of theory and life on which psychoanalysis itself balances. Throughout, Lieber considers what psychoanalysis--"the talking cure"--has to do with writing: the foundation of psychoanalysis on Freud's distinctive writing practice; what it means to write oneself as a psychoanalyst; the extent to which the cure involves a new kind of self-writing. Most broadly, The Writing Cure asks: What would it look like to write your way to the end of an analysis? Is it possible to write yourself into the position of psychoanalyst? Is it possible to write your cure?

A distinguished psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Irvin D. Yalom is also the United States' most well-known author of psychotherapy tales. His first volume of essays, Love's Executioner, became an immediate best seller, and his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, continues to enjoy critical and popular success. Yalom has created a subgenre of literature, the "therapy story," where the therapist learns as much as, if not more than, the patient; where therapy never proceeds as expected; and where the therapist's apparent failure provesultimately to be a success. Writing the Talking Cure is the first book to explore all of Yalom's major writings. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Jeffrey Berman comments on Yalom's profound contributions to psychotherapy and literature and emphasizes the recurrent ideas that unify his writings: the importance of the therapeutic relationship, therapist transparency, here-and-now therapy, the prevalence of death anxiety, reciprocal healing, and the idea of the wounded healer. Throughout, Berman discusses what Yalom can teach therapists in particular and the common (and uncommon) reader in general.