Talking About Therapy [Anglais] [Relié]

Talking About Therapy is worth talking about. It's even worth writing about, but most significantly, it's worth reading! It's a delightful combination of social history and storytelling that achieves the useful contribution of shedding light on the dark mystery of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Why in heaven's name do people undergo such an ordeal? Well, here are over 50 people who give a partial answer. As with any important contribution to this difficult domain, one emerges with more questions than asnwers, but Comarow and Chescheir sharpen these questions--no small achievement! As someone who has spent over half a century puzzling over these issues, I felt educated and inspired by the work and recommend it to therapists, patients, and all their friends and families, which is all of us.

Talking About Therapy is not only fun to read, it should be useful to anyone in therapy or thinking about being in therapy. One thing for sure: credentials mean next to nothing and going by our gut feeling is hard when our guts are in turmoil. Someone ought to build upon this scrupulously honest book and reveal even more of what patients say about their experiences, not what their therapists say they say.

Comarow and Chescheir had an interesting and unique thought. Why not evaluate psychotherapy through the words and experiences of those who had at some point in their lives undergone threatment? In Talking About Therapy, 52 patients tell it like it was and is. This is a fascinating narrative, rich in experience and detail. It is great reading for the layperson and the professional. Great therapy for all of us!

Filled with enlightening first-person accounts, Talking About Therapy tells us why patients sought therapy, what they think of the therapists to whom they entrusted their well-being, and whether the treatment was worth the struggle, the emotional pain, and the money. Through stories that are touching, sometimes shocking, and always candid, readers will learn how patients responded to a wide range of treatment. Whether portraying their therapeutic experience as "a scam" or "a liberation," or something in-between, the feelings shared by these forthright individuals will be fascinating to patients, potential patients, their families, and mental health professionals.

Donna Comarow is a clinical social worker and board certified diplomate in her field whose postgraduate studies include a master's degree from Catholic University's School of Social Service and a certificate in Object Relations Theory and Therapy from the Washington School of Psychiatry. For the past fifteen years she has been in private practice, focusing on parents and children, attachment theory, creativity and psychosis. Mrs. Comarow has lectured widely, conducted seminars and workshops for therapists, and taught psychology students at Dickinson College and American University. She has been involved with several nonprofit community mental health centers and was a case manager with the Mental Health Association of Montgomery County, Maryland, where she worked with chronic schizophrenic patients and their families during the era of deinstitutionalization. She and her husband live in Bethesda, Maryland.

Martha W. Chescheir, Ph.D., was a professor at Catholic University's School of Social Service for 18 years and has taught at Smith College. She took her doctorate at Smith College and post-doctoral training at The Tavistock Clinic in London and The Washington School of Psychiatry. Dr. Chescheir is a member of the faculty of The Washington School of Psychiatry. She lectures for the Greater Washington Society for Clinical Social Work and for several years was a consultant to social workers at Chestnut Lodge Hospital. Dr. Chescheir has worked for nearly 40 years with a wide variety of patients in her clinical practice. In 1986, she was named Social Worker of the Year by the National Association of Social Workers. Dr. Chescheir currently serves on the editorial board of The Clinical Social Work Journal, is a member of Who's Who of American Women and has published 17 articles in professional journals. She lives with her husband in Chevy Chase, Maryland.