- By Sanjana (Batch-2023)
Author : Lori Gottlieb
Date Published: April, 2019
Genre : Memoir
The Author is a psychiatrist and the book talks about her recollections of some of her counseling sessions, and parallelly she recollects memories from her own life. This book is candid and honest and speaks a lot of technicalities of a psychoanalysis process. What’s in testing is the author, the protagonist, a therapist herself who talks about her experiences, both from the offering and the receiving end of therapy (her profession), and how she makes a well-rounded sense of it.
The author also says how humanity and empathy are enemies to her profession and that might lead to internalizing someone’s pain. What the author actually tells is that her profession, contrary to the popular belief, has little or no room for emotions as it might lead to emotional attachments. While the psychiatric counselor herself goes through a traumatic relationship, she seeks help from another professional, which is when she makes a strong point that a psychiatrist fails the moment they internalize their client’s emotions. What they do and what they are expected to do is to follow all the metrics and methodology that they have been formally trained for and administer the prescribed process to their patients. What I picked up from the book is how therapists undergo therapy, which means that they absolutely believe in the process when they administer therapy to us too. The book concludes by mentioning that we lose our childhood to create better adulthood, but the aftermath is that it definitely shows at some point in our adulthood as our fears, insecurities, etc., causing behavioral dissonance.
The book is candid, frank, honest, and irresistible right from the beginning, taking us through a journey of recollections and realizations. What’s insightful for me from this book is the unscripted rules of the professional process and how the author places herself and takes us throughout on both ends of the process.