TALES FROM A TRAVELING COUCH

A fascinating memoir that helps laypeople understand the therapeutic process. Veteran psychotherapist Akeret (Photoanalysis, 1973, etc.) introduces five former patients, including a Jewish woman who is intent on remaking herself into a Spanish flamenco dancer; a man in love with a polar bear who literally wants to consummate the relationship; and a very gifted, if highly narcissistic and promiscuous, French writer who, when the author visits him after many years, reveals that he intends to make his suicide the subject of his last novel. In recalling his work with these five, Akeret reveals a great deal about his humanistic and existential approach to psychotherapy—one of his teachers was Erich Fromm—and illustrates how often it requires verbal restraint so that the practitioner may enter the patient's emotional and imaginative worlds. At other times, however, Akeret uses intuition and countertransference (the therapist's deepest emotional responses to the patient) to make unconventional, sometimes startling, interventions. With the polar bear's lover, this includes accompanying the patient to the circus cage where the object of his adoration dwells. Does psychotherapy ``work''?—i.e., make better the lives of individuals who often have invested enormous emotional energy and pain, not to mention money, in it? Akeret vaguely reports that of the five patients, three ``generally feel much better''; two don't. His sample is obviously too small for these results to be meaningful, and therapy is in any case more an art practiced between two idiosyncratic individuals than a science. Also, as Akeret rightly notes, there may be a values conflict between what the therapist thinks the patient needs and what the latter wants. Like Irvin Yalom's Love's Executioner, which it resembles, this book takes readers into the interpersonal nuances and occasional drama of psychotherapy—and into the human comedy—in a colorful, accessible, insightful way.