On the Couch: Great American Stories About Therapy - Paperback - BEST OFFER

Great condition! BEST OFFER WINS IT! Nineteen short stories explore the complexities of our cultural and psychological landscape in a collection that features John Updike's "The Fairy Godfathers," "The Whole Truth" by Stephen McCauley, and works by Lawrence Block, Donald Barthelme, and other notable American writers. From Publishers Weekly As Kates suggests in her introduction, psychotherapy is credited by some with profound curative powers and assailed by others as navel-gazing quackery. The 19 stories in this well-chosen collection observe the conventions of actual therapy, and, as in real life, each one "is concerned in some way with love and the difficulty of either attaining it or holding on to it." They reflect a spectrum of opinions on the discipline, exploring it with viewpoints and concerns as diverse as the gallery of writers who voice them. The all-star lineup includes Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Stephen McCauley, Peter Collier, Donald Barthelme, Francine Prose, Charles Baxter, Frank Conroy and Daniel Menaker. To impose some thematic coherence, Kates has grouped the stories into five sections ("Loss," "Secrets and Lies," "Power and Dependence," "Limitations" and "Love"), prefacing each with a brief discussion of relevant issues like transference, the abuses and limitations of a therapist's power and the factors that go into good therapy. But this volume is no academic treatise: each of the stories, all reprints, is above all a gripping literary experience. Some, like Steven Barthelme's bleak, creepy "Samaritan," which describes a pill-popping, sexually predatory therapist's mounting irritation with his mildly depressed client, are studies in alienation. Others, like Amy Bloom's charming "Psychoanalysis Changed My Life," are modern-day fairy tales. Together, along with the discerning afterword by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Sheldon Roth, they add up to a literary session that offers insight and entertainment?and that needn't stop after 50 minutes, either. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews An anthology of nicely ironic stories about therapy and analysis. Kates makes the point that therapy is peculiarly American, but she might also note that undergoing therapy is a peculiarity of the uppermiddle class, since the stories she has chosen to reprint- -either from magazine or previous book collections--are largely about well-educated people with the money to pay for treatment. Often, it's the chance to sample the sensibility of those who must work for a living that is at the heart of the therapeutic process. In Daniel Menaker's gentle satires of the cultured elite of New York City, ``I'm Rubber, You're Glue'' and ``Influenza,'' it's the blue-collar practicality of a Cuban analyst that spurs his ironic, detached patients to face up to their true motivations. In Peter Collier's moving ``Transference,'' a California man comes to terms with his father's death by turning his stern, practical, tough-talking analyst into a surrogate father. In Rebecca Lee's lyrical ``Slatland,'' the story a psychiatrist tells a little girl becomes her entire worldview, for good and ill. So much for the competent therapists. The incompetent ones are on display in Lorrie Moore's slight but hilarious ``If Only Bert Were Here,'' about a woman who refuses to get over the death of her cat, and about the therapist willing, for a fee, to listen to her; and in Stephen McCauley's dry ``The Whole Truth,'' which is about a woman who turns everything into a half-lie and the therapists who never figure her out. The masterpiece, though, is Lynne Sharon Schwartz's ``The Age of Analysis'' (from Acquainted with the Night, 1984), about a little monster raised by analyst parents, always in therapy himself, who learns to get his way through violent outbursts, dominating both his parents and his several psychiatrists. Schwartz sardonically examines therapy as a way of life, and eviscerates it. A superb gathering of intelligent, often moving, tales. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Condition

Used (normal wear)

Genre

Psychology

Format

Paperback

Title

On the Couch: Great American Stories About Therapy