From the Publisher
Announcing Steven Frankel, M.D.'s newest book: Making Psychotherapy Work, Collaborating Effectively with Your Patient. In press: The Psychosocial Press (an offprint of International Universities Press).
Is psychotherapy an art or science? Does it really work and if so how?
Just about everyone has doubts about whether psychotherapy is effective. Yet, people rave about their therapist: how helpful she has been, how wonderful he is. What accounts for the difference between therapies that receive accolades, and those that get panned. In this provocative book Steve Frankel sorts out good therapies from bad. The crucial ingredient he identifies is an uncanny, moving collaborative experience in which both patient and therapist are transformed. Perhaps most essential in making this process work is the therapist's authenticity and humility, his ability to appreciate and acknowledge what he doesn't know. Contrary to the belief that psychotherapists should not get involved with their patients, the key to successful therapy is heartfelt, even painful, moment-to-moment involvement. Making Psychotherapy Work: Collaborating Effectively with Your Patient, brings these principles to life. It describes a psychotherapy so deep-reaching and engaging that neither participant can avoid being changed.
Steve Frankel brings this point of view to refinement in this, his newest book. Here his collaborative psychotherapy method is fully evolved, providing a highly digestible theoretical and practical framework for the practicing psychotherapist. Making Psychotherapy Work: Collaborating Effectively with Your Patient, describes the crux of Frankel's highly effective and eminently usable portrayal of the psychotherapy process.
From the Back Cover
Making
Psychotherapy
Work
Collaborating Effectively
with Your Patient
by Steven A. Frankel, M.D.
In the field of psychotherapy there is no more important question than what makes therapy work. In this important new book, Steven Frankel explores this complex issue with characteristic openness, honesty, and originality. By identifying and explicating those elements that are essential to change, Frankel accomplishes what few authors before him have been able to achieve. He provides a clear, thoughtful and practically useful answer to the question of how psychotherapy actually heals. And in doing so he provides an invaluable contribution to our field.
Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D.
There is a lot of Straight talk in this, Dr. Frankel's most personal and courageous book. With unswerving honesty he describes the bind between the invocations of therapeutic authority and not knowing that he sees as an inevitable and necessary component of effective psychotherapy. This book introduces Dr. Frankel's conjunctive model of therapeutic collaboration. He demonstrates the model's utility through a series of cases and vignettes dealing with technical issues ranging from the therapist's self-disclosure to the involvement of a consultant. And suddenly, we as readers realize that he has managed to propel us right in the middle of the collaboration. Any therapist will find this experience a little disorienting, paralleling the shared not knowing that Dr. Frankel views as transformative. In this process he sets a standard for uniquely helpful practice.
Philip Erdberg, Ph.D.
In this thoughtful and evocative book Steve Frankel seeks to answer the basic question, how does fundamental change occur? Frankel's Honest, Courageous and Straightforward discussion of his own clinical experience shows that the therapist must be willing to engage in a highly collaborative relationship in with the therapist and patient are deeply affected and profoundly change. This important new book will be thought-provoking and stimulating for therapists at all levels of experience.
Darlene Bregman Eherenberg, Ph.D.
In Making Psychotherapy Work, Steven Frankel expands his earlier discussion of therapeutic disjunctions and their repair. Frankel passionately argues for a treatment model in which the therapist deliberately seeks conjunction and moves beyond the traditional therapeutic frame. Rich in evocative and highly readable clinical illustrations, this book challenges many traditional psychoanalytic ideas. Frankel's exposition emphasizes the centrality of therapeutic account-ability and integrity. He is willing to ask the hard questions and step outside the theoretical and clinical box.
Joyce Anne Slochower, Ph.D.
BN 63500 * ISBN 1-887841-57-1
PSYCHOSOCIAL PRESS
An imprint of International Universities Press, Inc.
59 Boston Post Road, Madison, CT 06443 U.S.A.
