Rating: 
Summary: An amazing work both literary as well as therapy related.
Review: This "novel" by Dr. Yalom is a true masterpiece. After having read his other popular books, I hesitated reading a "novel" , but what an amazing surprise... This work is really integrated, has great unity as far as structure goes and the subject area in which Dr.Yalom truly excells is really informative for therapists, analysts as well as patients. It gives insight not into just multiple relationships among doctors and patients but also among therapists themselves - patients in their relationships with their relatives and friends. It is an excellent guide to insight, analysis and problem-solving techniques as well as ethics, honesty and humanity. It should be required reading for courses and seminars that train analysts, therapists as well as counsellors and ultimately patients and friends and relatives of patients in therapy. Read this book -- honestly!
Rating:
Summary: An amazing work both literary as well as therapy related.
Review: This "novel" by Dr. Yalom is a true masterpiece. After having read his other popular books, I hesitated reading a "novel" , but what an amazing surprise... This work is really integrated, has great unity as far as structure goes and the subject area in which Dr.Yalom truly excells is really informative for therapists, analysts as well as patients. It gives insight not into just multiple relationships among doctors and patients but also among therapists themselves - patients in their relationships with their relatives and friends. It is an excellent guide to insight, analysis and problem-solving techniques as well as ethics, honesty and humanity. It should be required reading for courses and seminars that train analysts, therapists as well as counsellors and ultimately patients and friends and relatives of patients in therapy. Read this book -- honestly!
Rating:
Summary: Truly a masterpiece!
Review: This book is awesome. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be in therapy, here is your answer. This book gives you the inside information about the problems that faces both the therapeut and the pasient. Besides that it is written in a manner that intertwines the characters involved. We hear about his patients, and the next you know he is the husband of another of his patients, or the wife of the therapists advisor. The complications that this causes makes it into a humoristic book unlike anything I have ever read.
And the title alone, lying on the couch, is exceptional. It is the first clue into this naive therapist that truly believes that no one could lie to him. He is a good therapist, but he can't see this. So the conclusion is that the therapist, who thinks he can see what's going on, isn't much closer to the truth than the rest of his patients. And that's what makes this book so amusing.
This is a must read for anyone that has been in therapy, or are thinking about going there. And for everyone else that wants to know what it is like. If you're in for a laugh, run to the store and add this book to your collection. I promise you it will be worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Truly a masterpiece!
Review: This book is awesome. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be in therapy, here is your answer. This book gives you the inside information about the problems that faces both the therapeut and the pasient. Besides that it is written in a manner that intertwines the characters involved. We hear about his patients, and the next you know he is the husband of another of his patients, or the wife of the therapists advisor. The complications that this causes makes it into a humoristic book unlike anything I have ever read.
And the title alone, lying on the couch, is exceptional. It is the first clue into this naive therapist that truly believes that no one could lie to him. He is a good therapist, but he can't see this. So the conclusion is that the therapist, who thinks he can see what's going on, isn't much closer to the truth than the rest of his patients. And that's what makes this book so amusing.
This is a must read for anyone that has been in therapy, or are thinking about going there. And for everyone else that wants to know what it is like. If you're in for a laugh, run to the store and add this book to your collection. I promise you it will be worth it!
Rating:
Summary: Yalom Shrunk the Shrink
Review: This book is for anyone who ever thought they wanted to know what their shrink was thinking. And for any shrink who ever thought they knew what their patient was thinking. If Dr. Yalom set out to prove to all couch sitters or lyers at large that they truly are better off with an edited version of their shrinks thoughts, and to all shrinks that pyschology is certainly not a science, and barely an art, this is one successful book. What's even more fascinating, is how, despite the plot twists and the deceptions, almost all the tale's characters on either side of the couch come out ahead.
Rating: 
Summary: Amusing for the Author, but Rambling and Boring
Review: This book is intermittently well-written, meticulously thought-out, and ponderously boring. There are many psychiatrists and psychologists doing great work in helping their patients heal and grow. This book provides only a peek into that process. The author tries to prove he remembers his Psych 101 (Jungian and Freudian psychology), rather than offer compelling characters and plot. He then sprinkles the narrative and dialogue with references to more obscure psychologists to ostensibly cement, in the readers’ minds, that the author knows shrink-dom. As an aside, it is amazing to me that the only character of any depth is the protagonist (psychiatrist). The rest of the characters, shrinks and patients alike, are an uninteresting collection of facts and sound-bytes. This seems to go counter to the assumption that the psychiatrist might know his/her patients in some bubbly depth.This book is, for lack of a more poetic expression, mental .... Well-intentioned, but mostly uninteresting. The author manages to make a wonderfully complex and intricate subject (the mind) an ego-constructed platform for him to relate some sort of personal, cocky, catharsis (“wink, wink, I’m flawed too!”). So many words; so much ... babbling.
Rating:
Summary: A novel for psychotherapists
Review: This book will appeal to psychotherapists, but I'm not at all certain that the general reader will find it terribly satisfying. Paradoxically for a novel about the psyche, the treatment of the fundamental ideas is disappointingly mechanical. It not unexpectedly reads like a fictionalised account of several therapies and supervisions, and on this level it is fine and may provide for practitioners an oblique way of looking at certain issues, but a narrative is not a novel. Yalom has a basically good plot but there are problems with pacing, and too often I found myself skipping whole paragraphs in order to move on with the story. There are too many places where events languish in the doldrums and lose impetus, and too many where overdescription causes the tale to flag - the card game at Avocado Joe's, for example: tension should be rising here but it becomes becalmed in a treatise on card play. Much of the book is dialogue, and much of that didactic tracts of psychotherapeutic monologue linked unconvincingly with, "Go on," or "Okay, I'm listening." That said, the conversational dialogue is well-written though it falls short of being "hilarious". Concision is conspicuous by its absence and the book would have gained in tautness if it had been half the length. I'd recommend it to friends in the field but suggest that the general reader pass it by. A whole ream of tedious psychological description can be replaced by a single poetic insight, and that is what is lacking here.
Rating:
Summary: Had trouble putting it down
Review: This was a page-turner; one of my favorite novels that I read last year. This book is to the world of psychotherapy what the best of Grisham's books are to the legal profession--interesting, fast-paced, and informative.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite Yalom Book
Review: This was the best of the four I read by Yalom. I really enjoyed the book
Rating:
Summary: A GREAT BIRTHDAY GIFT
Review: THIS WAS THE FIRST BOOK OF MR.YALOM I READ AND I AM TOTALLY IMPRESSED.FOLLOWING THAT I READ 'WHEN NIETZCHE WEPT' AND 'EVERY DAY GETS A LITTLE CLOSER:A TWICE TOLD THERAPY'.HE IS PERFECT.I LOOK AFTER FOR THE NEXT NOVEL.
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