Customer Reviews

The Man with the Beautiful Voice: And More Stories from the Other Side of the Couch

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Dr. Rubin explains that there are a set of rules regarding the relationship between a patient and doctor and how she sometimes broke the rules to help her patients. She shows the soul-searching and thought processes that go into the decision to break the rules by describing interactions with some of her patients. She does a great job of describing these cases, building the tension for the reader who is wondering why the patient has come in for therapy; there is always a big payoff when the secret trauma suffered by each patient is revealed. This is a very short book and I found myself wishing it was longer. I could easily read 400 pages + of these gripping stories. The human drama never ceases to be interesting and the author has a talent for writing in simple yet artistic prose.

Dr Rubin's stories are drawn from her clinical practice and her experience with her patients. The reader meets Eve Gordon who endured a harrowing childhood with her alcoholic parents; now 39, she lives a life of virtual isolation and desperately wants to become her therapist's friend. Many sessions are spent with Eve curled up in the corner of the practice without uttering a single word. Bruce Marins, a cripple - a "Thalidomide baby", a drug taken by his mother to cure her morning sickness - who rejects sympathy as being patronising, who feels anger and distrust of people around him and who sees deceit, pity and rejection wherever he turns. As Dr Rubin is about to greet Bonnie Paulsen and Jerry Stillman in her office, she is far from picturing the way these two patients are going to deceive her with their egregious lies and carefully plotted hoax - "How easily any patient can defeat even the most artful and accomplished therapist." she writes! Jake Garvin suffers from manic-depressive psychosis and so needs help because he's having trouble writing his dissertation for his degree. This is all the more urgent since the two job offers Jake has received depend on his finishing his dissertation. A case which will unfortunately end very tragically. Richard Durbin and Valerie Goldner are a yuppie couple. But why does Richard stubbornly refuse to have a child with Valerie? What mysterious event in his past makes him refuse to become a father? And finally there is the case of Delfina Ortega, a Mexican American, who was pregnant at 16, then became an excellent high school student graduating near the top of her class, who was subsequently awarded full scholarship to the university and then, when she was accepted to a graduate programme in Latin American history, she falls into a panic attack.
Dr Rubin's cases are a wonderful read for those of us who are mere laymen in the field of psychology.

This book gives you an inside view of the therapist-patient relationship from the therapist point of view. It's enlightening to read how the relationship develops and how that impacts the patient's life. You can get a little bit of a feel for how therapy works and what happens. The book does a nice job of juxtaposing the 'rules' of how things are to be done and 'intuition' about how things should be done and the struggle between the two. My favorite chapter was the final one where the author shared her personal experience in therapy and what that relationship meant to her and did for her. A good read for a therapist or a client in therapy.

Wonderfully real and inspirational reflections of therapeutic sessions with a therapist who seems to have the healing combination of genuineness, authenticity, self- and other-awareness, and the innate desire to really hear and see her clients. The words harmoniously sing from the pages of this book with the chorus repeatedly reminding us that in therapy it is indeed the relationship that heals.

An excellent book to acknowledge the challenges and fears that therapists face in their profession !!

Dr. Rubin is an encouraging antidote to the old-school stony-faced therapist who answers your questions with questions. Here's an account that will both satisfy your innermost voyeur and humanize the helping professionals who see us at our most human. These are stories about people overcoming suffering and shame and Rubin depicts this with tremendous respect and heart. I appreciate the dignity she imparted to these souls who were at their worst at the time she encountered them. It gives me hope for a profession that is plagued with discredits, scandals and just plain low success rates. That hope lies in the fact that every person is different, therefore the therapist's approach -guided ideally by the therapist's own compassion and intuition- must also be different.

The Man with the Beautiful Voice is a beautifully written book. Each case study is written in a colorful narrative style. The stories are educational and fasinating. Each story ends with an interestig twist almost as if a spy thriller. Dr. Rubin wrote with such candor and openness I felt like she gave therapists her personal permission to be human. Excellent book!