A psychoanalyst uses storytelling to explore the complex and, for some women, all-consuming and difficult mother-daughter relationship. The prolific Chernin (My Life as a Boy, 1997; In My Father’s Garden, 1996; Crossing the Border, 1994; etc.) envisions the psychological life of women as made up of seven stages: idealizing the mother, seeing her from a new perspective and revising the idealized image, blaming the mother and feeling rage toward her, forgiving her, identifying with her, letting go of the attachment to her, and finally taking one’s life into one’s own hands. This latter stage is marked by a breakthrough moment that Chernin calls “giving birth to one’s mother.” The symbolic new mother can now give birth to the daughter’s new self, and thus is established a new mother-daughter relationship. To illustrate these stages, Chernin has created characters based loosely on real women she has known. The storytelling format varies: Sometimes Chernin introduces a character and has her tell her own mother-daughter story; sometimes Chernin narrates; sometimes Chernin and the storyteller interact in a dialogue. Yet there is a certain sameness to six of the seven stories—their main characters, whether abused, neglected, or controlled, seem to be singularly obsessed with their mothers. Only in the seventh, in which a mother recounts the ordeal of her daughter’s chaotic wedding preparations, does a bit of life-restoring humor emerge. Chernin presents her own mother and daughter in a banal epilogue that unintentionally raises the question of how differently those two might have written their scenes. Readers who identify with intense and troubled mother-daughter relationships may find Chernin’s views on women’s psychological development plausible and these accounts sympathetic and engrossing; others may find themselves muttering, “Get a life!”
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88096-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
In a sure-to-be-controversial book, Hari delivers a weighty, well-supported, persuasive argument against treating depression...
Mining the root causes of depression and anxiety.
Acclaimed British journalist Hari researched and wrote his bestselling debut, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), while pushing aside work on a subject that was much too personal to accept and scrutinize at the time. This book, the culmination of a 40,000-mile odyssey and hundreds of hours of interviews with social scientists and depression sufferers (including those who’ve recovered), presents a theory that directly challenges long-held beliefs about depression’s causes and cures. The subject matter is exquisitely personal for the author, since he’d battled chronic melancholy since his teenage years and was prescribed the “chemical armor” of antidepressants well into his young adulthood. Though his dosage increased as the symptoms periodically resurfaced, he continued promoting his condition as a brain-induced malady with its time-tested cure being a strict regimen of pharmaceutical chemicals. Taking a different approach from the one he’d been following for most of his life, Hari introduces a new direction in the debate over the origins of depression, which he developed after deciding to cease all medication and become “chemically naked” at age 31. The author challenges classically held theories about depression and its remedies in chapters brought to life with interviews, personal observations, and field-professional summations. Perhaps most convincing is the author’s thorough explanation of what he believes are the proven causes of depression and anxiety, which include disconnection from work, society, values, nature, and a secure future. These factors, humanized with anecdotes, personal history, and social science, directly contradict the chemical-imbalance hypothesis hard-wired into the contemporary medical community. Hari also chronicles his experiences with reconnective solutions, journeys that took him from a Berlin housing project to an Amish village to rediscover what he deems as the immense (natural) antidepressive benefits of meaningful work, social interaction, and selflessness.
In a sure-to-be-controversial book, Hari delivers a weighty, well-supported, persuasive argument against treating depression pharmaceutically.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-830-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Although Pipher defines the therapist’s job as clarifying issues and presenting choices rather than telling people what to...
A long-time psychotherapist mingles reassuring tips for a newcomer to the field with personal recollections of her own successes and failures.
Employing the same format as other volumes in this series (Todd Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist, p. 205, etc.), Pipher (Reviving Ophelia, 1994, etc.) writes letters to Laura, a young graduate student, setting forth some of her views on what therapy is all about and how good therapists do their work. The letters are grouped into seasons and date from early December 2001 to late November 2002. The winter correspondence discourses on the characteristics of good therapists, conducting family therapy, and helping clients connect surface complaints with deeper issues. Spring takes the author into the subjects of how to help patients deal with pain and achieve happiness, the use of metaphors as therapeutic devices, and the role of antidepressants in therapy. Pipher considers family therapy in more detail in the summer letters, which also take up the problem of the therapist’s personal safety. In the fall, she turns to ethical issues facing therapists, how storytelling can help clients see themselves in more positive ways, how to recognize and deflect patients’ resistance, and how to deal with failure. Ruefully recounting some of her own missteps and bad judgments, Pipher reminds her student that therapists are human and errors are inevitable. Throughout, she eschews psychological jargon and takes a commonsensical approach to the vicissitudes of living. As she puts it in describing her own sessions with clients, “I do bread-and-butter work”: she often suggests getting a good night’s sleep, going for a swim, or taking a walk.
Although Pipher defines the therapist’s job as clarifying issues and presenting choices rather than telling people what to do, giving advice seems to be second nature to her. Fortunately, the advice appears to be well considered and benign.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-465-05766-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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