http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1186513.ece

[Raging Quiet]

Thanks for sharing!

Very interesting but rather disturbing. Thanks for sharing Earthmamma

[Fixated]

It says I have to subscribe to read the whole thing.

Originally Posted by Fixated

It says I have to subscribe to read the whole thing.

Says that for me too.

[skeksi]

I didn't read the whole review, but I poked around on the net and it does look like an interesting read--I'm adding it to my queue!

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by earthmamma

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/...cle1186513.ece

One of those cases (I'm not going to tell you which one!) hits close to home.

[velcro003]

i want to read the whole thing! can anyone copy and paste?

[BonnieJean]

Wish I could read the rest of the article. It looks good.

[CantExplain]

If you think psychoanalysis is basically listening to someone jabber away on a couch — or, as a friend of analyst Stephen Grosz puts it, bang on about “my Oedipus complex, or a dream about my dad’s ****” — then consider what Indiana-born Grosz had to go through with one of his first patients, Peter. A year after Peter began his sessions, Grosz received a letter from Peter’s wife telling him that Peter had killed himself. Grosz was *devastated. He felt guilty, angry, and shocked. Not as shocked, though, as when he got a message from Peter six months later on his answerphone: “It’s me. I’m not dead. I was wondering if I could come and talk to you.” Unable to describe his feelings in analysis, Peter had faked the letter and come up with a catchy way of letting Grosz experience those very feelings for himself.

Grosz’s fascinating casebook of some of the patients he has seen over 25 years (and 50,000 hours) as a London psychoanalyst is full of such bizarre stories —though it’s hard not to wonder, as much as Grosz attempts to mask his clients’ identities, whether they’ll appreciate *recognising themselves on these pages. Divided into a series of essays as flitting and brief as the 50-minute sessions in which analysis takes place, Grosz’s vignettes are so brilliantly put together that they read like pieces of bare, illuminating fiction.

Lawyers, teachers, architects — the majority of Grosz’s patients couldn’t appear more ordinary at first blush. Yet as they lie back and describe their lives on his couch (actually it’s “a firm single bed with a dark fitted cover”, in case you were wondering), something off-colour always begins to emerge. Like Poirot with a degree in psychiatry, Grosz listens out for the little key that will unlock his patient’s problems. Even once he’s found the key, though, it doesn’t mean his client necessarily wants to open the door. Take “Francesca L”, who says she’s happily married to Henry, her go-getting, high-achieving and patently two-timing, bed-hopping scoundrel of a husband. Francesca doesn’t want to pick up on any of the signs that Henry clearly can’t keep his trouser zipped. Every night, he goes “to his health club”, but whenever Francesca shows up to surprise him, he’s mysteriously not there. She calls him up at the office, and the workmate who answers shouts: “Hey Shagger, it’s for you.” Grosz does his analytic best to nudge her: “Aren’t you a bit curious why his colleague called him ‘Shagger’?” “No, not especially,” Francesca responds. The analysis eventually works, though. Two years later, Francesca confronts Shagger.

One of the pleasures of this book is its revelation of the analyst’s own short*comings. Even when Grosz solves his patient’s troubles, he sometimes doesn’t see what’s right under his nose. He recalls one patient, a scruffy 10-year-old, Emily, who had been brought in by her immaculately presented parents, because she had been wetting herself. Grosz won Emily’s trust; she told him that since her baby brother’s birth she had felt neglected. Their first session over, she stopped wetting herself. But over the course of a year, Grosz didn’t notice what his receptionist eventually pointed out to him: Emily had been getting neater and neater, while her parents had become more dishevelled. Lo and behold, when Emily’s analysis finally came to an end, they asked if he might recommend some marital therapy.

As each of Grosz’s clients hits the couch, you find yourself anxiously reading these detective stories for what solution Sherlock Freud will come up with. One patient, Graham C (Graham, if you’re reading this, you might want to close your eyes now), bores Grosz so much that the long-suffering shrink has to “have a coffee and splash cold water on my face” before each session. Yet he eventually deduces that Graham’s capacity to bore the socks off anyone is really an unconscious impulse to inflict on *others the pain he felt as a lonely child. (We don’t find out if Graham, post-analysis, has gone on to become a raconteur of *Ronnie Corbett proportions.)

Most intriguingly, Grosz — as all analysts do — probes his own emotions to find clues to what his client might be feeling. Nowhere is this more astonishing or moving than in his treatment of a nine-year-old, Thomas, who is thought to be suffering from Asperger’s. Thomas has been expelled from school for bringing a kitchen knife into class and telling one of the pupils he’d “like to chop her head off”. In his first session with Grosz, he spends their 50 minutes calling him “big tits” and “fat lesbian”. In his *second, he calls him a “dirty Jew” and goose-steps around the room shouting “Sieg Heil ”. All this, Grosz can take.

It is only when Thomas starts spitting in Grosz’s face every day, over 18 months, that the calm analyst begins to crack. He tells a colleague how angry he feels inside. Perhaps, the colleague tells him, Thomas “needs you to be angry with him”. So, at their next session, Grosz *suggests this to Thomas. “When you spit on me, you want me to get angry with you, because if I’m angry it means I still believe we can fix what’s *broken… Can you tell me what’s broken?” Thomas pauses, then replies: “My brain’s broken, stupid.” He starts telling Grosz how sad he is that other kids are growing up while his “brain doesn’t work, not like other people’s”. He spits at Grosz once more — and then never again.

It is this combination of tenacious detective work, remarkable compassion and sheer, unending curiosity for the oddities of the human heart that makes these stories utterly captivating.

Written by: Robert Collins Published: 6 January 2013

[Wren_]

this is one thing I wonder with the vignettes also; do clients recognise themselves or others as themselves and get hurt by the revelations given ...
do t's need to let clients know they intend to turn their heartache into fodder for their books
yes I like reading such material; yes it's helpful ... but still, it seems that it could be intensely damaging as well and how much change has to happen for things to still be 'confidential'

[CantExplain]

Originally Posted by tigergirl

this is one thing I wonder with the vignettes also; do clients recognise themselves or others as themselves and get hurt by the revelations given ...
do t's need to let clients know they intend to turn their heartache into fodder for their books
yes I like reading such material; yes it's helpful ... but still, it seems that it could be intensely damaging as well and how much change has to happen for things to still be 'confidential'

My T asked my permission before using me as a case study.

Originally Posted by tigergirl

this is one thing I wonder with the vignettes also; do clients recognise themselves or others as themselves and get hurt by the revelations given ...
do t's need to let clients know they intend to turn their heartache into fodder for their books
yes I like reading such material; yes it's helpful ... but still, it seems that it could be intensely damaging as well and how much change has to happen for things to still be 'confidential'

Yes that crosses my mind but I'm afraid my interest beats any integrity and I read it.

[Anne2.0]

In law in my state, you cannot disclose any details of any case, disguised or not, without a client's permission. Lawyers have been disbarred for writing blogs and such things.

I don't know what the rules are for therapists in Britain, but I think the more seriously a profession takes confidentiality, the more absolute the rule should be.

One can assume that permission was obtained from the clients, however, rather than the opposite.

Yeah but, it's interesting though, ain't it. You know in a kinda car crash way. **** permission. Just get the juicey **** on paper! ;-p