A vastly informative, coherent, and valuable assessment; useful and accessible for both mental health professionals and...
A contemporary appraisal of schizophrenia and its puzzling traits and treatments through the lens of a physician’s esteemed 40-year practice.
Building on his previous book, Catch Them Before They Fall: The Psychoanalysis of Breakdown (2013), which provided alternative methods of observing and treating psychotic breaks, veteran psychoanalyst Bollas presents a companion volume that skirts the causes and differing diagnoses of schizophrenia in favor of analyzing varying aspects of the condition itself. In an erudite, well-structured, three-part narrative, the author chronicles his early, intensive clinical experience with schizophrenic children and adults in the 1970s, accessible theoretical analysis of a typical patient’s behavior, and the methodology of popular psychotherapeutic practice and how it can be tweaked for maximum effectiveness. In a set of vividly harrowing chapters, the author describes the “apocalyptic moments” leading up to a schizophrenic breakdown, clearly showing how frightful the illness can be to the patient, their loved ones, and even their caregivers. Also insightful are Bollas’ explorations into schizophrenic speech, habitual behavior, and thought and personification patterning. He logically argues against assertions by associated mental health professionals that the illness is genetically determined and against the rampant prescribing of antipsychotic medications, which dull patients into what he calls a zombielike state. Too often, notes the author, patients are left at the mercy of a “throw the key away finality,” with the human element of the afflicted wholly disregarded. Instead, Bollas advocates for more fundamental curative measures employing compassionate, natural body therapies like daily massages and methodical interpersonal communication between psychotherapist and patient, approaches that have been proven efficacious within the scope of his own clinical practice. Precisely when the psychotic break occurs becomes a key component as well: “Timing is everything in analytic work.”
A vastly informative, coherent, and valuable assessment; useful and accessible for both mental health professionals and laypeople—even those who don’t share the author’s unique perspectives and treatment alternatives.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-21473-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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