Momma And The Meaning Of Life

Momma And The Meaning Of Life
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2014-03-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0465062962

As the public grows disillusioned with therapeutic quick fixes, people are looking for a deeper psychotherapeutic experience to make life more meaningful and satisfying. What really happens in therapy? What promises and perils does it hold for them? No one writes about therapy - or indeed the dilemmas of the human condition - with more acuity, style, and heart than Irvin Yalom. Here he combines the storytelling skills so widely praised in Love's Executioner with the wisdom of the compassionate and fully engaged psychotherapist. In these six compelling tales of therapy, Yalom introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: Paula, who faces death and stares it down; Magnolia, into whose ample lap Yalom longs to pour his own sorrows; Irene, who learns to seek out anger and plunge into it. And there's Momma, old-fashioned, ill-tempered, who drifts into Yalom's dreams and tramples through his thoughts. At once wildly entertaining and deeply thoughtful, Momma and the Meaning of Life is a work of rare insight and imagination.

Tales of Psychotherapy

Tales of Psychotherapy
Author: Jane E. Ryan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre: Client-centered psychotherapy
ISBN: 9781855754928

Anyone with a faint curiosity about human nature will be enthralled by these remarkable stories. Based on true experience, or re-worked into fictional short stories, this book takes the reader through a mesmerizing sequence of compelling pieces that reveal the innermost concerns of psychotherapy practice.The anthology, written by both psychotherapists and prize winning fiction authors, is a book of surprise, delight, anguish and hope. It draws on one of the most intimate conversations that a human being can achieve - that of the psychoanalytic hour - and gives these encounters a fascinating context in the form of people's lives. Some of these stories give strong evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy - how by listening to someone's most private desires, remarkable transformations can occur. Others ask the reader to consider the fallibility or vulnerability of the therapist and their own concerns and lives.

Tales of Un-Knowing

Tales of Un-Knowing
Author: Ernesto Spinelli
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1997-09
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0814780903

Presents the lives of eight individuals whose experiences illuminate a variety of dilemmas and anxieties that most of us encounter at different points of our lives. According to Spinelli (psychology, Regent's College), therapy at its most fundamental level involves the act of revealing, reassessing, and reconstructing the life stories that clients tell themselves in order to establish or maintain meaning. The existential therapist must not only listen, but must remain "un-knowing," i.e. open to new interpretation of that which is seemingly familiar, thus bringing to light unexamined possibilities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Creatures of a Day

Creatures of a Day
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-02-24
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0465040519

"The publication of Creatures of a Day is reason to celebrate." -- Steven Pinker In this stunning collection of stories, renowned psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom describes his patients' struggles -- as well as his own -- to come to terms with the two great challenges of existence: how to have a meaningful life yet reckon with its inevitable end. We meet a nurse who must stifle the pain of losing her son in order to comfort her patients' pains, a newly minted psychologist whose studies damage her treasured memories of a lost friend, and a man whose rejection of psychological inquiry forces even Yalom himself into a crisis of confidence. Creatures of a Day is a radically honest statement about the difficulties of human life, but also a celebration of some of the finest fruits -- love, family, friendship -- it can offer. Marcus Aurelius has written that "we are all creatures of a day." With Yalom as our guide, we will find the means to make our own day not only bearable, but also meaningful and joyful.

Tales from the Therapy Room

Tales from the Therapy Room
Author: Phil Lapworth
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2011-01-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0857024957

"These ten fictional short stories give counselling students a unique, fly-on-the-wall view of what actually goes on in therapy. Exploring aspects of the client-therapist relationship, they provide entertaining, vivid and thought-provoking descriptions of the therapeutic journey. Rather than suggesting a "correct" approach to counselling, the stories explore possibilities and issues, including contracting, boundaries & confrontation, therapist self-disclosure, dream interpretation, conflicting belief systems, the influence of the consulting room environment."--Cover.

Existential Psychotherapy

Existential Psychotherapy
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 708
Release: 2020-03-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1541647440

The definitive account of existential psychotherapy. First published in 1980, Existential Psychotherapy is widely considered to be the foundational text in its field— the first to offer a methodology for helping patients to develop more adaptive responses to life’s core existential dilemmas. In this seminal work, American psychiatrist Irvin Yalom finds the essence of existential psychotherapy and gives it a coherent structure, synthesizing its historical background, core tenets, and usefulness to the practice. Organized around what Yalom identifies as the four "ultimate concerns of life"—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—the book takes up the meaning of each existential concern and the type of conflict that springs from our confrontation with each. He shows how these concerns are manifest in personality and psychopathology, and how treatment can be helped by our knowledge of them. Drawing from clinical experience, empirical research, philosophy, and great literature, Yalom provides an intellectual home base for those psychotherapists who have sensed the incompatibility of orthodox theories with their own clinical experience, and opens new doors for empirical research. The fundamental concerns of therapy and the central issues of human existence are woven together here as never before, with intellectual and clinical results that have surprised and enlightened generations of readers.

Cracked

Cracked
Author: James Peter Davies
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-03-06
Genre: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
ISBN: 9781848316546

Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed – 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone last year – and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today?The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now ‘medicalised’ into illnesses that require treatment – usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychological therapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients’ well-being. The charge sheet is damning: negative drug trials routinely buried; antidepressants that work no better than placebos; research regularly manipulated to produce positive results; doctors, seduced by huge pharmaceutical rewards, creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and ethical, scientific and treatment flaws unscrupulously concealed by mass-marketing.Cracked reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.

Becoming Myself

Becoming Myself
Author: Irvin D. Yalom
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2017-10-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0465098908

Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom puts himself on the couch in a “candid, insightful” (Abraham Verghese) memoir​ Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this profound memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. He opens his story with a nightmare: He is twelve, and is riding his bike past the home of an acne-scarred girl. Like every morning, he calls out, hoping to befriend her, "Hello Measles!" But in his dream, the girl's father makes Yalom understand that his daily greeting had hurt her. For Yalom, this was the birth of empathy; he would not forget the lesson. As Becoming Myself unfolds, we see the birth of the insightful thinker whose books have been a beacon to so many. This is not simply a man's life story, Yalom's reflections on his life and development are an invitation for us to reflect on the origins of our own selves and the meanings of our lives.

Tales from Family Therapy

Tales from Family Therapy
Author: Thorana S Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131779141X

You often see books on theoretical approaches and new interventions in therapy, but you rarely, if ever, find a book where therapists discuss their personal reactions to and views of the therapy they offer. In this amazing volume, Tales from Family Therapy: Life-Changing Clinical Experiences, psychologists, psychotherapists, and marriage and family counselors come together to share their unique experiences in therapy sessions and how they’ve learned that often the clients know more than they do! As you will see, and as these therapists reveal, sometimes all the top-notch and most innovative theories in the world won’t help a client in distress.Tales from Family Therapy isn’t just about therapists learning a lesson or two from their clients. It’s about compassion, healing, being taken by surprise, thinking on your toes, and encouraging people to believe in their strengths--not just their weaknesses. These stories represent to the authors some of the most special, most rewarding, and most puzzling moments in all their years of therapy. They invite you to share in their recollections and discussions of: the power of speaking accepting, respecting, and working with the realities clients bring the importance of first impressions in counseling how personal narratives develop through relationship coloring outside the lines of the dominant culture helping clients determine when rocking the boat is needed listening to your clients and not just your theories developing the self-of-therapist In the therapy room anything can happen, and as Tales from Family Therapy shows, anything does. Graduate students, counselors, licensed therapists, family educators, and family sciences professionals, as well as lay readers, will find this insightful book a helpful forum where the struggles, doubts, and triumphs of psychotherapy are revealed to encourage and inspire those who participate in the therapeutic process.

The Good Story

The Good Story
Author: J. M. Coetzee
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2015-09-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0698405218

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. J.M. Coetzee: What relationship do I have with my life history? Am I its conscious author, or should I think of myself as simply a voice uttering with as little interference as possible a stream of words welling up from my interior? Arabella Kurtz: One way of thinking about psychoanalysis is to say that it is aimed at setting free the narrative or autobiographical imagination. The Good Story is a fascinating dialogue about psychotherapy and the art of storytelling between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with training in literary studies. Coetzee and Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both of their approaches is a concern with narrative. Working alone, the writer is in control of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in developing an account of the patient's life and identity that is both meaningful and true. In a meeting of minds that is illuminating and thought-provoking, the authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, gangs and the settler nation, in which the brutal deeds of ancestors are accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, Coetzee and Kurtz explore the human capacity for self-examination, our wish to tell our own life stories and the resistances we encounter along the way.