Customer Reviews

The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship Between Therapist and Patient

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Once again the author of the much heralded "Fat is a Feminist Issue" and the insightful "Hunger Strike", has managed to break new ground with her latest book "The Impossibility of Sex." Susie Orbach manages to write in a manner that is easily comprehended by both the professional analyst or therapist and the client, the consumer of therapy. She provides an invaluable glimpse into the mind of the therapist. For anyone who has ever been part of the therapuetic process, this book answers some of the queries that the client may have about what the therapist if really thinking. In traditional or Freudian therapy, the analyst's role was something of a blank screen onto which the patient would project his or her thoughts,dreams, and feelings. Susie Orbach, however, suggests to us that the therapist/client relationship has a powerful impact and is significant in the life of the therapist as well as the client. She also addresses the issues of countertransference, which is an issue that some therapists and clinicians may feel should be confined to professional journals. What Susie Orbach has done in effect, is to make the therapist more human and less mystical, which can only serve to enhance the trust that should be inherent in the therapuetic process. Though there is unspoken power differential in the client/therapist relationship, Susie Orbach succeeds in making it a more egalitarian one,without sacrificing it's innate value to both client and therapist.

Orbach's accounts are indeed fictional, and this is not made clear in the jacket copy. The stories, however are well written and interesting, and probably good approximations of the thoughts, words and feeling inside a therapy session. Many therapists have written fascinating and instructive accounts of their patients' case histories but have simply gotten permission to change the names and perhaps a few telling facts so that they are still a true refleciton of that case. For a good collection of fiction and non-fiction that illustrates the patient-therapist relationship, read Inside Therapy: Illuminating writings about patients, therapists and psychotherapy.

The Impossibility of Sex was outstanding. Orbach has written a book that is at once instructional for therapists and their clients and interesting to the reader as though it were a novel. It is rich with description and insight that almost makes you wish Orbach's main line of work were as a writer of fiction. I say 'almost' because this book makes it obvious that she has found her true line of work, therapy and clinical research. One can only hope that there are many more therapists out there like her, for although she makes it clear that these exchanges in the book did not actually occur in her office, the reader has to know that this is a therapist who has a seemingly endless wealth of knowledge of her field, empathy for her patients, and a willingness to stay open to all possibilities in the therapeutic setting.

Although the seven 'case histories' are fictitious, they come across as real. The psychological profiles are surrounded with life details of that make it nearly impossible to accept that these are not actual people.

Orbach's book is laced with clinical explanations and theories for various occurences in thse case histories that are easy to understand for the lay person. For anyone in therapy or considering it, this would be a great book to read; the personal insights you would gain alone make it worthwhile. The psychotherapeutic community is well-served by the publication of this book. It is a fully researched call for therapists to open the dialogue about their changing roles in analysist-analysand relationship. While it is likely that this will be a controversial book in some therapeutic circles, the questions posed by Orbach deserve serious consideration.

Actually led to a breakthrough in my degree of trust with my own therapist. Caveat emptor: it's FICTION, not accounts of actual cases. Nonetheless, it got me out of my narcissism long enough to realize that my therapist is indeed a human being with her own feelings. Wow!

Numerous contemporary British psychotherapists, of which Orbach is one, have written compassionately and insightfully - for the lay person as well for pracitioners - on countertransference. Orbach has a clinical practice. Of course she is a good person who wants the best for her patients. But in a leap of faith, she has made up the stories, invented the patients. This is not about her clinical practice. It is about her. These fictional patients exist as vehicles by which we learn about Susie Orbach. Very disappointing. In addition, The book has been tarted up for publication and hoped-for sales by the use of the word "sex" in the title. We learn very little about her process, or even her respect for, interest in, or conflicts with with her (made-up) "patients." A hodge-podge. I came away feeling that in Orbach's view, the most compelling subject is - herself.

This is a very well-packaged book that promises a lot more than it delivers--which is actually a whole lot of overblown fictional Freudian psychobabble. Most of the book consists of heady, blow-by-blow analyses of what Orbach and several of her patients were thinking and feeling during her treatment of them. It's not until page 225 (of a 253 page book!) that Orbach slides in the kicker: "The predicament posed by confidentiality...led me to decide to invent the characters of Adam, Belle, Joanna, Edgar, Jenny, Carol, and Maria"--in short, the analyses that we've just spent the last 200+ pages reading about as if they factually happened--are complete fiction. Her rationale for inventing her patients is is flawless, but it should have been made clear in the very opening pages of the book and delineated much more clearly in the catalog and jacket copy. There is absolutely no reason this book should be categorized as nonfiction when--as the author herself makes clear--not one thing in it is based on fact.

Great book for anyone in the field of clinical therapy. Lots of food for thought. Enjoyable reading, forthright and soul searching.

In "The Impossibility of Sex," Susie Orbach relates several fictional tales of psychotherapy. Unfortunately, this is very poor fiction indeed. The greatest flaw of the stories in this book as *stories* is that they are too sterile. Orbach dutifully reports on the events of her fictional patients' lives, yet somehow we don't really get to know these patients, or really to care about them. That's probably because all she does is *tell* us about them. There is very little dialogue in the book; the patients almost never speak for themselves. The book consists of approximately 200 pages of the authors inner reflections. Admittedly, the author's express purpose in writing the book was to give patients insight into the therapist's thought processes. Unfortunately, without a little action and dialogue to accompany those processes, they make extremely dull reading.

Furthermore, the book misses its target audience. As I've already said, the author intended this book primarily for patients -- that is, consumers of mental health care services. However, I don't think it will be a very satisfying or interesting book for that audience. Ms. Orbach claims that the book will provide insight into the thoughts of the therapist during therapy. Perhaps it does, but most of the thoughts revealed are of an academic or theoretical nature, and not of the human, emotional sort that most patient-readers are probably looking for. Unfortunately, these academic and theoretical insights will be too elementary for most academic and professional readers, leaving this book with a very small audience, if any.

Readers looking for fictional and/or fictionalized accounts of therapy that depict the therapist as a human being would be far better off reading the works of Irvin Yalom (especially "Lying on the Couch", a novel), Samuel Shem ("Fine", "Mount Misery"), or Allen Wheelis ("Doctor of Desire").

It wasn't the scholarly piece of work I was looking for. Freud and Feminism just don't mix for me - but it seems to work for her.

Speaking as someone who has interest in psychology, and is considering making a career change into that field, I was terribly disappointed with this book. The whole idea behind me reading this book was to get more general information regarding psychology so that I could make a better informed decision regarding whether or not a career in that field would be for me. Unfortunately, most of the book was WAY over my head. Orbach could be totally full of it and I wouldn't even know better. While the majority of the book was indecipherable to me, the parts that dealt with the actual interactions between therapist and patient did make for somewhat interesting, if uneducational, reading. Someone with a degree in psychology might get something out of this book, but I didn't. The worst part of it all, as has been explained in other reviews here, is that at the end of the book, Orbach explains that everything in it is fictional. This, in my opinion, made the book truly worthless, realizing that with an entirely fictional account, she could make the patient do whatever she wanted, which would make everything too easy for her. Everything ends up too neat and tidy, and I suspect that in real life, such things are very rarely that simple.