An often illuminating psychiatric memoir.
In this debut memoir, a woman tells of abusive therapy sessions with a New-Age doctor.
When Seagraves began writing a book about her “journey through incest,” she wrote glowingly of her therapist. She noted his gentle guidance, helpful suggestions and comforting manner. But in that first draft, she didn’t accuse him, as she does here, of “cupping my breast, kissing me on the lips at his wife’s wake and funeral….I left out that he slid his hand under my underpants to stroke my abdomen.” She writes that her therapist, known for his “enthusiastic championing of esoteric spiritual systems,” was trained in bioenergetics, a body-oriented psychotherapy based upon the work of Wilhelm Reich. Seagraves was emotionally vulnerable when she began seeing him in 1985 at age 53, and during their sessions, she recalled disturbing memories of being raped by her abusive, sadistic father. She alleges that her therapist’s methods, however, were manipulative and disrespectful: “I’m not being weird. I’m not being sexual,” she says he told her, before lying on top of her, belly to belly, on the floor. When Seagraves eventually sued for medical malpractice, she says that she discovered that the therapist had “betrayed the confidences of at least fifty-four persons, mostly patients, many of whom I knew”; she also realized that she’d spent $17,000 on recommended “conferences, sessions, consultations, lessons, classes, exercises, weird treatments, and healers over three years.” Seagraves, a sensitive, skillful writer, vividly describes childhood scenes, her father’s cruelty, her mother’s distance, and her anguish and confusion. However, some readers may wonder why the author kept going to the therapy sessions for so long. Seagraves includes transcripts from recorded sessions, however, that show the powerful web that she claims the therapist wove.
An often illuminating psychiatric memoir.Pub Date: April 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1489568014
Page Count: 302
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf