After 35 years in practice, a prominent New York psychotherapist questioned whether therapy made any difference in his patients' lives. So, on a sunny morning in April, Dr. Akeret got in his van and set off to visit his most memorable former patients--a journey "in search of story endings". Like a brilliant detective novel, this book tells its stories in fascinating detail while raising fundamental questions about psychotherapy.

An average day in the life of a psychologist can be a frenetic one. A 9 a.m. appointment to help a woman manage a husband who won't take out the garbage quickly shifts to a session with a convicted rapist at 10 a.m. After talking with a child an hour later about his fears of school, the psychologist meets his therapist to deal with his own fears, followed by lunch with a socially-phobic colleague who's already had four martinis by 1 p.m. And it's only Monday. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, thoughtful and irreverent, Crazy is the incredibly honest and insightful story of how one mental health professional deals with his own personal problems and those of the people he treats. Part exposé, part memoir, it reveals what therapists really think about their profession, their colleagues, their patients, and their own lives.

Stand back! The tales in this raunchy round-the-world romp might get you dirty. We've all had unspeakable experiences while traveling that we're ashamed to admit, but these often become our best stories in the retelling. The writers in this collection cast inhibition aside and reveal their weirdest and worst moments and how they made the best of them. And memorable moments in exotic destinations come in all shapes and sizes: insects as big as Pam Anderson’s left tit, regrettable sex, stink-eyed officials, horrible healers, Lady Gaga’s shoes and Madonna’s special meal, trigger-happy militants, and peeping Tom rock stars. Adventure vicariously as: Spud Hilton (not Monty Python) finds the Holy Grail by accident. Meghan Ward squats, and then the toilet grunts back, in Goa. Kasha Rigby proved how tough she is on National Geographic’s Ultimate Survival Alaska, but is she a match for a 90-year-old bone breaker in Guatemala? Namibians stereotype Chinese men as Bruce Lee—Gerald Yeung wonders if attacking baboons will do the same. Keph Senett (hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Pussy Riot) braves bombs, police and a Soviet-era sofa bed to play soccer at the LGBT games in Putin’s Russia. Jabba-the-Turd versus Shannon Bradford in an epic showdown in Argentina. And many more….

Psychoanalysis and Narrative analyzes narrative in literary fiction, film, and autobiography through different psychoanalytic lenses including gender and socio-cultural perspectives. This book aims to demonstrate how fictionists and film makers have intuitively developed – through their own creativity – many of the psychoanalytic discoveries about the human mind. Subverting the usual direction of “applied psychoanalysis,” the book goes from creativity to psychoanalysis, and focuses on four internationally known Argentine writers: Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, and Luisa Valenzuela; two Argentine women filmmakers, Lucrecia Martel and Lucía Puenzo; and French essayist and writer Serge Doubrovsky. This volume will be of interest to students and academics interested in autobiography and autofiction.

Salman Akhtar is a Professor of Psychiatry, a Training and Supervising Analyst, a member of numerous editorial boards, winner of many awards, including the highly prestigious Sigourney Award, a writer of several hundred articles, a poet, and the author or editor of over one hundred books. A modern-day Renaissance man, his elegant writing is simultaneously scholarly and literary and brings a light touch to profound material. Phoenix Publishing House is proud to present his most inspiring works in a stunning ten-volume hardback set, fit to grace the shelves of collectors and libraries with its high-quality finish.

If you ask someone the question, "Tell me a story that changed your life," there will almost certainly be a thoughtful pause before a huge grin emerges. Everyone's life has been guided and impacted by stories, beginning with the earliest fables and nursery rhymes our parents used to instill moral values to the last time you wanted to illustrate a point in a meeting or get a laugh out of a friend over dinner. Storytelling is a uniquely human activity, among our first and most enduring forms of communication. This is a book about the meaning of stories in people's lives, especially those that have produced enduring changes in their values, behavior, lifestyle, and worldview. Carefully documented and supported by research from the social sciences, as well as from neurobiology, the humanities, media studies, and arts, Jeffrey Kottler will explore how and why stories are so powerfully influential in people's lives, especially those that lead to major life transformations.

There are stories that we use to explain what happened to us twenty years ago or last wee, those we use to explain why the world works the way it does, and those that we sue to "fix" the world when it doesn't work the way other stories said it should. And as the author points out in this collection of essays and interviews, some of these stories are better than others. This book is an investigation into which might be the better stories and how they can help clients reach their goals in therapy. This book contains fifteen essays and interviews written or co-written by Michael Hoyt. The collection represents Dr. Hoyt's recent thinking on helping clients with the brief, future-orientated therapeutic approaches.

A scintillating collection of writings on the mysterious, controversial, and intimate process of psychotherapy. Everyone with an interest in the art and science of psychotherapy - practitioners, patients, students, and avid readers of Freud, Jung, et al-will find this lively anthology an engrossing read. A varied mix of essays, book chapters, case histories, and compelling fiction written by veterans of both sides of "the couch" and representing many schools of thought, Inside Therapy includes: Janet Malcolm's The Impossible Profession * Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker * Eric Fromm's The Art of Listening * A. M. Homes's In a Country of Mothers * Theodore Reik's The Third Ear * and others. The foreword by Irvin D. Yalom, author of Love's Executioner, offers additional wisdom, humor, and perspective. At a time when managed care threatens the psychoanalytic tradition, this dramatic, inspiring collection reminds us of the healing power of insight and the unique gifts of the patient-therapist relationship.

The author, a CNN correspondent and Daily News journalist, shares her insights into the grieving process as she explains how a time of bereavement can be transformed into an opportunity for positive change and growth. Reprint.

Provides the background stories behind 150 photographs of both famous and ordinary people.