Summer 2024: An Omnium Gatherum

Introduction:

Can it have been eight months since I last posted on here? It is not for lack of materials, as you shall presently see! I read as greedily and voraciously as ever, rapidly eviscerating some books while with others slowly meandering through them repeatedly as I soak in their wisdom.

Instead, I have been busy with all the usual aacademic and clinical duties, and all spare energies have gone into writing not one but two books of my own this year. With one of them done, I have come up for breath and can say something brief about both (before reviewing books devoured this year to date). 

1) The first has morphed in my mind countless times. But now it has coherent shape, and would have been done this summer but for the unexpected instrusion of book #2, noted below. This first book will be more 'meditative' (for lack of a better word) and gives me a chance to develop some things I have been thinking about for thirty years now. The tentative title is On Being a Psychiatric Monk. It develops ideas my beloved Nina Coltart first laid out very sparingly, especially her notion of "bare attention" which the clinician must constantly cultivate.

Such a notion was drawn from her immersion in Buddhism, about which I have hitherto been ignorant. But she inspired me to start reading Mark Epstein's books, two of which I have now finished and want to re-read: first was Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. This was followed by Going to Pieces without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness.

In thinking about "bare attention," I returned to a fascinating woman I first read about in the early 1990s: Simone Weil. She has a very rich essay "Attention" that I read in Gravity and Grace. For context to Weil's essays I read The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas by Robert Zaretsky (University of Chicago Press, 2021).

2) This second book of mine, which I had neither plans nor foreknowledge of, came roaring out of nowhere in the late spring, part of it decided upon simply by gathering the lecture notes I use for my Introduction to Psychotherapy/Counseling class every year. In that class I have had the students read a number of books (especially those of Lou Cozolino and Nina Coltart) and articles, especially those of Jonathan Shedler and Nancy McWilliams. But I decided I could write my own book not only as a short, accessible, suitable text for my students, but also (and here I must cite Kristian Kemtrup for this inspiring idea) as a rejoinder to the increasing number of right-wing critics of psychotherapy, of whom some American journalist named Abigail Shrier is most prominent just at the moment with her Bad Therapy: Why Kids Aren't Growing Up. Her book advances many of the usual romantic and reactionary fantasies ("chosen traumas" as Vamik Volkan calls them) about our present moment but it also, importantly, advances criticisms of the field of psychotherapy some of which deserve to be taken seriously. So that is what I spend the first chapter of the book doing: responding to, and in many cases agreeing with, Shrier about the many practices that constitute bad therapy. 

Nobody likes a scold, however, so I spend the rest of my book unfolding a more compelling vision of what psychotherapy could and should be like largely inspired from Winnicott's argument that “psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together.”

Here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction:

I: What Good Psychotherapists Do Not Do

II: What Good Psychotherapists Are and Do:

III: What Good Psychotherapy Requires: a Frame

IV: What Good Psychotherapy Requires: Psychologically Minded Patients   

Conclusion

Brief Annotated Bibliography

Acknowledgements.

I have been unable to decide on title for this book. There are four contenders at the moment, none of which I am entirely happy with. Your feedback, and additional suggestions would, dear reader, be gratefully appreciated:

A Short Guide to Finding a Good Psychotherapist Psychotherapy: A Playbook for Patients, Students, and Clinicians Psychotherapy: A Playbook for Patients and Professionals Alike On Not Giving Blow-Jobs to Stick Figures on White Boards: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy Gone Awry

Right. Now to briefly go through some of what I have been reading this summer in the hope that it might be useful to others:

Clinical Readings:

Having previously read two of her books, especially The Analyst's Vulnerability, which I wrote about here, I was eager to read another of Karen Maroda, and this July read Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation: Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process. I began with her chapter on the use of touch in psychotherapy, of which I am not an advocate at all, while she came very carefully to moderate her previously negative views, too. But the richest part of the book is her reflection on how all psychotherapy is "grief work," to use that almost pedestrian phrase.

Self-Examination in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Countertransference and Subjectivity in Clinical Practice by William F. Cornell came out from Routledge in 2018. Perhaps this book might be useful for beginning students unaccustomed to self-examination and drawing on counter-transference reactions, but I found it very thin gruel.

That was also my reaction to The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic Communication by Paul Watzlawick (Norton, 1993). Much better books on this topic exist including Paul Wachtel's Therapeutic Communication: Knowing What to Say When and, even more than that, Leston Haven's invaluable Making Contact: Uses of Language in Psychotherapy, which I wrote about at length last summer and find myself returning to often.

Having been so taken by Haven's book, I decided I should read more of his. Reader, I was not impressed, but that is okay for I have long been aware that authors of more than one book usually have a dud or two in the mix. Thus I was rather disappointed by the thinness of A Safe Place: Laying the Groundwork of Psychotherapy (1989) and Coming to Life: Reflections on the Art of Psychotherapy (1994). Slightly more edifying were Haven's chapters in The Real World Guide to Psychotherapy Practice, eds., Alex N. Sabo and Leston Havens (Harvard UP, 2000).

Critical Analyses of the Field of Psychotherapy:

Because I am a neurotic academic anxious not to repeat what others have said before me, and even more anxious to ensure all my bases are covered, I decided, in writing the second of my books noted above, I had to look at recent critiques of psychotherapy from those within the field, and so I read and almost entirely agreed with Enrico Gnaulati's Saving Talk Therapy: How Health Insurers, Big Pharma, and Slanted Science are Ruining Good Mental Health Care.

Advancing Psychotherapy for the Next Generation, eds., Linda L. Michaels, Tom Wooldridge, Nancy Burke, and Janice R. Muhr (Routledge, 2023) deserves the widest possible audience for it publishes the results of one of the largest and best studies of what patients want and benefit from in psychotherapy. A study of this size has not been seen, as far as I know, since the 1995 Consumer Reports study. Here's a hint totally unsurprising to practicing clinicians: patients want to be listened to at depth to explore the dynamics of their minds and relationships. They do not want worksheets, breathing exercises, chakras, and the whole farrago of fatuities one so often encounters today.

Some Winnicott (of course):

I own all but one of Christopher Bollas's books so when he published another one recently I was of course going to get it: Essential Aloneness: Rome Lectures on DW Winnicott. Regular readers and re-readers of Winnicott, as I am, will not find a lot of new material here, but this book would make the best brief introduction to Winnicott I know of. It is cogently and compellingly written based on lectures which Bollas gave decades ago and, strikingly, did not feel the need to alter for publication. There is a freshness and liveliness to each of the short chapters.

This is one of those books I did not--could not--devour and eviscerate, but instead had slowly to read and re-read, and I expect I will go back to regularly: Steven Cooper, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis. He picks up on Winnicott's argument, quoted above, about psychotherapy being a place for play to ask what that looks like. Happily Cooper does not give definitive answers to that question but writes in such a way as to invite the reader to imagine his or her own thoughts on the question, noting that you can never play with each patient in exactly the same way. (Another book on this theme of playing was a total disappointment--virtually worthless.)

Books Useful for Training or Recommending to Students:

If you are trying to teach your students or supervisees about the centrality of the working alliance, then this is a book to have in your back pocket: The Therapeutic Alliance: An Evidence-Based Guide to Practice, eds., Christopher J. Muran and Jacques P. Barber (Guilford Press, 2010).

In May I was asked to do some training for local clinicians on working with psychotic disorders, and just a few days before I did so, a brand new book arrived, which I tore through at the time but really must go re-read to benefit from. It is very rich and compelling: From Breakdown to Breakthrough: Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis by Danielle Knafo and Michael Selzer (Routledge, 2024).

A Little Sex:

I still cannot overcome my dumbness to say anything about two books Avgi Saketopoulou. The first of these is her just staggering work Sexuality Beyond Consent, which I read back in mid-January. I have tried writing about it several times, but to no avail. She has forced me to re-think things in ways I would never have expected or been prepared to until quite recently.

The second is one she co-authored with Ann Pellegrini: Gender Without Identity It took requires more commentary than I can make here. Perhaps some day...

Speaking of sex, because I work with sex offenders clinically I ordered Brett Kahr's Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies to see what some of the international research says about types, themes, and prevalence of various fantasies. Kahr's book is very workmanlike. (A friend tells me he is currently enjoying one of Kahr's other books: Coffee with Freud.)

A Bit of Bromberg and Bach:

Once I take a liking to an author I usually have to devour all his or her works. So in January of this year I ordered the remaining books of both Philip Bromberg and Sheldon Bach that I did not own. I've read chapters in each of them, but hope to finish them by Christmas.

Non-Clinical Reading:

How boring it would be only to read books in one's field! Thus not all my reading is clinical: I confine that to daytime and weekday reading.

Bedtime and weekend reading lately has consisted of many other books (especially those about the canal systems of England and Wales, a curious obsession I cannot explain), including Adrienne Rich's poems, and Charles Moore's splendid Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol.3: Herself Alone. Though I found her politics repellent then as now, I was fascinated by her fierce and contradictory character and perhaps allowed myself a bit of a crush on her as I watched her final year in office when I was a teenager briefly toying with a possible career in law and politics. Moore is a much more judicious commentator and elegant writer than I was expecting, and the book, while a bit over-laden with detail sometime, is very gripping. Having finished the final volume, I'm about to go back and read the first.

Prior to finishing the Moore biography, I read the second of Steven Kotkin's studies of Stalin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941. Among its many virtues is its careful attendance upon and wise reflections on historiographical principles used and abused in telling the story of Stalin, who has been the subject of a myriad of biographies, some of which I have read.

Traveling this summer I perused used bookstores in North Carolina and West Virginia, and found Harry S. Truman, written by his only child Margaret. It's a charming biography of one of the most compelling men to occupy the White House. This has made me determined to re-read David McCullough's Truman, which I first read twenty years ago. Recently two new books about him have emerged which I may eventually read.

Truman's exact contemporary and man of similar temperament and politics, Clement Attlee, was the subject some years back of John Bew's splendid book Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain. These two men nearly alone of all politicians in the last century remind me that not all political leaders are mendacious, malevolent, and repellent creatures.

I am part-way through the very dense Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography by Edward Mendelson.

Once that is done, I will start another biography I found on my travels this summer: Jacques Lacan by Elisabeth Roudinesco. If you don't know Roudinesco's works, you should. Her Freud: In His Time and Ours is one of the best single-volume biographies of the great man (less idealistic and more gritty than Peter Gay's book, and far less officious, of course, than Ernest Jones' authorized three volumes) while her Why Psychoanalysis? is a short apologia which avoids special pleading.

With the academic year beginning Monday, time for reading and writing sharply diminishes and so it may well be December before I have time to pop back on here, but who knows....