Customer Reviews

Object Relations Therapy: Using the Relationship

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As a psychologist, I found this book to be a great basic book on doing psychotherapy from an object relations perspective. Easy to read and understand difficult concepts and patients. Highly recommend.

While Object Relations Therapy was highly readable, even entertaining, I was deeply concerned with some of the author's more extreme client interventions, and would urge readers to consider this. I felt this most notably with regard to the treatment of an incest survivor on p. 141. Not only is the woman called a name that's unprintable through Amazon, but when people attempt to comfort her, the author/therapist "pries their fingers" from his client. He also fails to intervene with clients drinking alcohol in the office, and who, as a consequence wreck a car, potentially causing himself and others great harm. For another client, invervention isn't made until after a suicide attempt, although it could have been, (p. 124). While I understand we're to assume prelinguistic problems with these clients, the reality is that the case studies refer to trauma clients (the suicide was ten when her mother, also in the house, killed herself). I also understand that Cashdan's trying to propose a therapy similar to what we might have once called "tough love." However, the extremes here seem horrifying and dangerous to me, and do, by his own admission, nearly result in repeated client deaths. I certainly don't want to destroy the read (I bought and read it), I just urge all readers to consider the real effect of such practices on clients. Books like this should be read to raise awareness of such practices. Some of the clients presented here would be able to pursue litigation justifiably, and therapists, especially those just beginning their practices, should be made aware of this. To invoke more rational object relations players, such as Kernberg and Klein, just didn't seem apt. I suspect this book will create quite a controversy.