Psychotherapy And The Obsessed Patient

Contributors offer an enlightening array of approaches to the obsessed personality. A wealth of theoretical insights and suggestions for therapy with obsessed patients--those suffering from bulimia, monomania, love obsessions, and more.

Help your clients successfully integrate the angel and the rebel! Saints and Rogues: Conflicts and Convergence in Psychotherapy is a unique look at two extremes of human behavior and thought—and how they meet within the psychotherapy experience. In this extensive resource, you will gain a greater understanding of human potential by exploring personalities where the line between conformity and divergence has been blurred. This book will help psychotherapists, pastoral and marriage and family counselors, and medical/nursing service providers guide patients and clients in turning negative actions and decisions into positive ones. In Saints and Rogues, you will find: an assessment of the life of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949)— called “rogue therapist” by his peers; today a hero for his influence on psychotherapy practice bullying in school—the creation of a prevention program used at the K-5 level designed to appeal to the empathy of the children who are bullied as well as the perpetrators an examination of historical, sociological, and psychoanalytic research about Italian Americans stereotyped as rogues during the twentieth century and in the media today interviews with individuals self-identified as “third gender” who live as neither men nor women—and their frequent encounters with spirituality and much more! Saints and Rogues: Conflicts and Convergence in Psychotherapy reevaluates the ethical ramifications of dual/duel relationships, revealing how a roguish character may be seen as saintly and vice versa. This book emphasizes the importance of seeing and treating one another with the same consideration as we would give ourselves. If knowledge is power, the reader—therapist and layperson alike—will find strength in these pages to face their home, work, or school lives with more confidence and pride.

New York Times Book Review • Editors' Choice Entertainment Weekly • Best Books of the Month Buzzfeed • Spring Books We Couldn't Put Down One of Finland’s most dynamic novelists bursts onto the American literary scene with this erotic story of an ambitious therapist’s sessions with an unforgettable patient. Natalia cannot stop thinking about sex. With this mesmerizing tale of one woman’s potent affliction, award-winning Finnish writer Laura Lindstedt makes her American debut. Narrated by an unnamed, ungendered therapist who leaps at the chance to employ their most experimental methods, My Friend Natalia offers a gripping examination of the power dynamics always present but rarely ever spoken about in therapy. “Something flared within me,” the therapist notes, “and it wasn’t merely sympathy, the emotion I feel for most of my clients. It was more like a sudden experience of harmony, wholly inappropriate given the circumstances.” It is clear from the moment Natalia barges into her new therapist’s office that she has motives beyond simply fixing her sex life. She is quick to mention that the same exact painting hanging on the therapist’s wall—an abstract piece titled Ear-Mouth—once hung in her grandmother’s living room. This comment deeply unsettles the therapist, as does the large alarm clock that Natalia brings with her, intent on timing the sessions herself. And the tape recorder. At first, Natalia seems to play along with the rules of therapy. She partakes in the therapist’s pain-displacement exercises, word games, and even produces a few anatomical illustrations. She muses on the art of pornography, and boldly examines seminal figures like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom she poses the question, “Did Jean-Paul consider Simone a woman at all? Or was she nothing but a pencil sharpener?” By combining philosophy and literature, repressed childhood memories and explicitly unrepressed erotic experiences, the sessions quickly shed all inhibitions. Still, the therapist can’t help but wonder: What does Natalia really want? Brilliantly translated by the award-winning David Hackston, My Friend Natalia buzzes in prose charged with sharp banter and double entendres as the therapist hurls strange—and hilarious—experimental exercises at Natalia, and their work builds to an explosive climax. In taking a deconstructive yet utterly scintillating approach to the self-help narratives of our time, Laura Lindstedt emerges as a rare and unflinching international literary talent.

The last two decades have seen unprecedented increases in health care costs and, at the same time, encouraging progress in psychotherapy research. On the one hand, accountability, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency have now become commonplace terms for providers of mental health services whereas, on the other hand, an increasingly voluminous literature has emerged supporting the effectiveness of a number of types of psychotherapies. There now exists the possibility for the design and delivery of mental health services that-drawing upon this literature-more closely approximate empirically established data concerning the appropriateness and effectiveness of psychotherapy. The Handbook of the Brief Psychotherapies is intended to capture one major thrust of this movement: the development of a group of empirically grounded, time-limited therapies all sharing a common interest in the clinical utilization of a structured focus and an emphasis on time and action. For many years, professional self-interest, competing theoretical para digms, and the vagaries of practice, wisdom, and clinical myth have influenced the practice of psychotherapy. A critical questioning of the resulting, predomi nantly nondirective, open-ended, and global therapies has led to a growing emphasis on action-oriented, problem-focused, time-limited therapies. Yet, ironically, this interest in the brief psychotherapies has not so much involved a radical departure from traditional therapeutic modalities as it has emphasized a new pragmatism about how time, action, and structure operate in life as well as in therapy.

A brave teen recounts her debilitating struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder—and brings readers through every painful step as she finds her way to the other side—in this powerful and inspiring memoir. Until sophomore year of high school, fifteen-year-old Allison Britz lived a comfortable life in an idyllic town. She was a dedicated student with tons of extracurricular activities, friends, and loving parents at home. But after awakening from a vivid nightmare in which she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she was convinced the dream had been a warning. Allison believed that she must do something to stop the cancer in her dream from becoming a reality. It started with avoiding sidewalk cracks and quickly grew to counting steps as loudly as possible. Over the following weeks, her brain listed more dangers and fixes. She had to avoid hair dryers, calculators, cell phones, computers, anything green, bananas, oatmeal, and most of her own clothing. Unable to act “normal,” the once-popular Allison became an outcast. Her parents questioned her behavior, leading to explosive fights. When notebook paper, pencils, and most schoolbooks were declared dangerous to her health, her GPA imploded, along with her plans for the future. Finally, she allowed herself to ask for help and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This brave memoir tracks Allison’s descent and ultimately hopeful climb out of the depths.

**THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** "An unforgettable—and Hollywood-bound—new thriller... A mix of Hitchcockian suspense, Agatha Christie plotting, and Greek tragedy." —Entertainment Weekly The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husband—and of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive. Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one of London’s most desirable areas. One evening her husband Gabriel returns home late from a fashion shoot, and Alicia shoots him five times in the face, and then never speaks another word. Alicia’s refusal to talk, or give any kind of explanation, turns a domestic tragedy into something far grander, a mystery that captures the public imagination and casts Alicia into notoriety. The price of her art skyrockets, and she, the silent patient, is hidden away from the tabloids and spotlight at the Grove, a secure forensic unit in North London. Theo Faber is a criminal psychotherapist who has waited a long time for the opportunity to work with Alicia. His determination to get her to talk and unravel the mystery of why she shot her husband takes him down a twisting path into his own motivations—a search for the truth that threatens to consume him....

Successful interventions for helping terrorized patients cope with and overcome the pangs of uncertainty and dread which they experience constantly.