Tales of Psychotherapy

Synopsis:

This 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.

Description:

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 mesmerising sequence of compelling pieces that reveal the innermost concerns of psychotherapy practice.

Some of these stories give strong evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy - how by reaching into someone’s most private desires and needs and listening to these, remarkable transformations can occur. Others ask the reader to consider the fallibility or vulnerability of the therapist and their own concerns and lives. Without exception, the authors have written with courageous openness, revealing the emotional challenge of receiving therapy, or being someone who provides it.

Wise, mature, witty, and occasionally grim, this is an essential and most enjoyable read about the subject of life.

'In reading these tales, we enter a mythic consulting room, the walls papered over with the fragments of lives woven together into a mosaic of the human heart and mind.' - Marilyn Charles

Contents
BOUNDARIES
Why Freud Turned Down $25,000, Brett Kahr
French Leave, Rosemary Stones
The Complaint, John Woods
Then and There, Deborah Oilman
Silence is for Listening, Anne Zachary
The Bike, Barry Christie
COINCIDENCE
Coincidence or Fate? Sandra Black
Synchronicity and Serendipity, Paul Thompson
Homecoming, Jan Waterson
HEALING
The Honeysuckle Man, Marika Henriques
What about God? Helen Alexander
Angela’s Search for her Identity, Annie McMillan
Waking in the Blue, William Bedford
Desert Rose, Diane Helliker
The Picture, Bernardine Bishop
Life Drawing, Alice Bree
Shadow Man, Sandra Primack
THE PSYCHOTHERAPY RELATIONSHIP
Getting There, John Welch
A Headache, A.H. Brafman
The Doubled Therapist, Valerie Sinason and Melanie Skye
Unfinished Business, Carole Smith
Pink Mist, Zoë Fairbairns
The Analyst’s New Couch, Judith Harris
Ancient History, Phil Leask
Terra Incognita, Peter Heinl
Avoiding the Toads, Annie Macdonald
Criss Cross, Anna Fodorova
Stones, David Herbert
Mustard Therapy, Alexandra Wilson
CHILDHOOD
Fragments, Ella Landauer
The Process of Healing the Fish, Mary Steel
Jigsaw, Barbara Hillman
Finding the Four Year Old, Katherine Justesen
By Bread Alone, Antoinette Marshall
LOVE
Dream On, Phil Lapworth
Taking an Afternoon Off, David Herbert
It Takes Two to Tango, Stephanie Elliot
The Case of Anna F., Maggie Murray

About the Editor
Jane Ryan initially went to art school in Canterbury, and then followed a career in community development. She founded an intercultural community centre in St Paul’s, Bristol, now known as Kuumba. She trained in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the early 1990s and then set up Confer, an independent organisation that offers a platform for leading thinkers in mental health and an inclusive space for the exchange of views between theoretical approaches within mental health and medical disciplines. She is the editor of ‘How Does Psychotherapy Work?’ (Karnac 2005).