Customer Reviews

Lying on the Couch: A Novel

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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!

I really enjoyed the dynamics of this book and appreciated the easy writting style! It was a great change of pace from the literature and classics that I usually read with out being overly soap-operish. I thought that the book intuitvley explored relationships at many dimensions and in many situations. It was an interesting point that the best of the best can so easily decieved. I have often wondered if a therapist would know if a patient was lying or not. I thought the book was well written and easy to get into. I don't think there was anyone that could not relate to one of the many characters at some level. I liked how, in every person, the good and bad sides of that character were revealed. The book was pretty rivoting and susspenceful, though I thought that one of the characters we had grown to know and love would somehow come out to be the villan- and that was a little dissapointing- but overall- I really enjoyed this book. It was great to bring the revered 'doctors' down to our level to realize that they really aren't too much different from the people that come to them for help!

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!

I'm not particularly interested in psychotherapy, so I wasn't thrilled when my book club picked this to read. I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it immensely.

Therapist Ernest Lash decides to try an experiment: having a completely open and honest relationship with a new patient. Little does he know what effect this will have on him, his patient, and the people who know them. The chain-reaction that follows is amazing and entertaining. This book is great testimony to the power of honesty and integrity.

"Lying on the Couch" is a clever novel by Irvin D. Yalom, a therapist who has written a number of non-fiction books on psychotherapy. This work of fiction peers into the lives of various psychoanalysts and the people whom they analyze. The two main characters are Marshal Streider, a pompous psycholanalyst who is driven by a desperate hunger for fame, wealth and social position, and Ernest Lash, who is Marshall's student. Lash tries a novel approach in psychotherapy. He tries experimenting with an "honest" approach towards his patients. Yalom has fun dissecting the lives of Streider, Lash and their patients. The title, "Lying on the Couch," is a play on words. Yalom tells us that we often lie to our analysts and to ourselves, because lying appears to be easier than facing up to the truth about ourselves. He also probes some of the unconscious feelings that drive some people's self-destructive behavior. In addition, Yalom hilariously punctures the pomposity of jargon-spewing analysts who never use a one-syllable word if they can help it. Ultimately, Dr. Yalom poignantly shows that being true to ourselves and working through our childhood issues is a necessary step towards ultimate growth and fulfillment. This book is creative, literate, and often very funny. "Lying on the Couch" is a delightful entertainment for the thinking reader who is fascinated by the life of the mind.

I was fascinated from the first moment with this novel. It's a very interesting expose of psycho-therapy - although you don't have to be involved with psycho-analysis to be able to appreciate the story.

The main protagonist, Ernest Lash, is just as his name suggests; earnest. He is vulnerable, erotic, sincere and trying his very best to rise above the professional detachment of his peers. He is experimenting with being totally honest with his patients, and in doing so, discovers the same pit-falls and dangers experienced in any truly intimate relationship.

The novel tracks the gamut of human foibles, neatly shared between it's believable cast of characters. Pomposity, megalomania, addiction, betrayal, lust and revenge all rear their ugly heads - tempered by the redemptive actions of forgiveness, compassion and sincerity. A very satisfying and informative journey into the miasms of the human mind.

I don't know why I was surprised that Yalom was such a good writer. Perhaps I expected the dryness that often accompanies the writing of many other professionals in their fields of expertise. Not so in this case. Yalom cleverly draws the reader in from the first paragraph and keeps us turning pages until the last.

Highly recommended.

I'm a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst too, and probably a contemporary of Yalom's, and I declare the hero could have been me, a psychoanalytic maverick. Therefore I can say that without a doubt, if you have ever been a psychotherapist or a patient, the story will resonate. There are many fascinating sub-plots, and an element of suspense, and a magnificent, ironic ending, but the central theme is the contrast between an older, traditional Freudian, who is 'supervisor' and a younger, maverick eclectic, born-therapist, whose character grows and evolves as he performs a therapeutic miracle on a very unlikely patient.

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.

This is a fascinating and most entertaining novel by an American professor of psychiatry. True, several strands in the novel interweave at the end in a rather contrived manner: the coincidences that bring this about are somewhat unlikely, and the last few pages, though moving, are completely unbelievable. Never mind: just suspend your disbelief and enjoy. Without giving away the plot, its main subject is how two people go insincerely and schemingly into psychoanalysis with unsuspecting analysts. (Note the double entendre in the title of the book.) We are told about their thought-processes and about those of the analysts. Those of the analysts are an amusing mix between, on the one hand, the psychoanalytical theory and the professional ethics they try to apply and, on the other, their own vulnerabilities to eroticism, power and money. The scheming patients get more than they bargained for.

Those who know little about psychoanalysis will learn a lot about it; those who are already familiar with it will find both the interior and the exterior dialogue wickedly funny. But having had his fun in mocking some aspects of his own profession, Yalom in the end validates it. And I think he wants to convey a serious and controversial message of his own: that there may be ways of helping a patient that could be more fruitful than the cultivation of the analyst's remoteness from the patient on which orthodox theory insists.

At the end of a book, if you want more and would have loved the author adding more pages instead of leaving some things to your imagination, the book is a success. Quite naturally, you'll dwell on such a book even after putting it away. "Lying on the couch" by Irvin Yalom is one of those successful books.

Based on accepted popular precepts about honesty and greed, that honesty is good and greed is bad, the author weaves a very interesting story with psychoanalysts and analysands as primary characters. One doesn't have to know transference from countertransference to love the book. The author throws psychoanalysis jargon at you thick and fast, frequently quotes many great authors and eminent personalities of the field and makes his characters make their points using Freudian (and his likes') research findings - but he also writes them in a way a lay person can understand and not feel the need to read between the lines or reach for a 'Dummy's guide to shrink's world" to get the plot.

The most interesting aspect of the book to me was Dr. Ernest Lash's resistance against the advances of a female patient, Carol who with intentions of ruining his practice comes on to him filling the therapy sessions with her fantasy erotica. Whether (or how) Dr. Lash works his way out of this hole makes a racy read. There are a couple of con-stories embedded in the narrative as well; they aren't great - it is easy to see through the stings - but they make interesting read all the same. The denouement in both cases gave me a good deal of satisfaction.

Common wisdom suggests that Shrinks are very good at getting to the unstated and that puts them at a distinct advantage in detecting lies. The author proves that wrong and shows how even the hardiest of psychotherapists fall for 'lying on the couch'. For many practitioners of the profession it is unthinkable that a patient would pay money to lie. The author also gives us a peek into various extra-therapeutic relationships that could ruin a therapy (and the therapist).

Though there has been a large corpus of psychoanalytic research of over 100 years - it is clear that the field hasn't progressed towards any unified scientific approach to problems. Understandable, `each patient is unique' as the author points out. Consequently, therapists though sharing affiliations with same professional groups sometimes vary vastly at their treatment methods. Added to that, there are many schools of thought completely at loggerheads with others creating much politicizing and back-stabbing in their elite circles. This kind of internal strife within professional bodies is brought out very well in the book.

Characters in this book are either therapists or patients. Every non-therapist you encounter has had shrink sessions for emotional, financial, legal, marital or any other conceivable kind of problems. Funnily enough, there is one character who gets a shrink to help him with his gambling problems; that is not to get rid of gambling habit, but to observe him closely during a card game and find all the tell tale signals he has been giving out unwittingly to his gambling partners.

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While reading the book, at times I was convinced that if I chose to walk into a shrink's office, just for fun, he would still find some problem with me that I have been unaware of, and then resolve it to my satisfaction.

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All in all, a very good book!