The author of the nonfiction Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) and the novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992) now takes up the most vexing issue facing psychiatry: the boundaries of treatment. Yalom begins with the story of Seymour Trotter, an unconventional therapist who has had a long sexual involvement with a female patient 40 years his junior. His testimony troubles Ernest Lash, the San Francisco practitioner serving on the ethics panel that will ultimately drive Trotter from the field, because Trotter's techniques appear to have delivered the woman from her borderline world of promiscuity and self-mutilation. Some years later, one of Ernest's patients, a timid, obsessive man, leaves his wife for a younger woman. The jilted wife, Carol, a ruthless lawyer, blames Ernest and hatches a plot to ruin him by becoming his patient and seducing him. Ernest is single, lonely, and mightily tempted, but he is also conscientious and honest, and begins to see through Carol's nearly airtight story. Carol becomes a true patient and confronts the fears that have tortured her. And sex is not the only tricky boundary that Yalom explores. In a nice twist, Ernest's analytic supervisor, Marshal Streider, an upright, formal man who feels Ernest's commitment to complete honesty is naive, enters into an investment with a con man passing as a patient. The con man reads Marshal's vulnerabilities perfectly: excessive ambition and love of money. Marshal, raging, friendless, unable to consult with another practitioner, pours out his soul to a lawyer, Ernest's patient Carol. The student teaches the master as Carol, without violating her confidences, draws therapeutic strategies from Ernest and ``treats'' Marshal—or, rather, forces him to treat himself. A marvelous examination of how psychiatrists actually think, building to a vision of a community healthy and mature enough to confront its deepest and most persistent fears. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-04295-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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