Customer Reviews

Women in Therapy

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I highly recommend Harriet Lerner's work on women and anger, unhappiness, bottled up rage, emotional and hysterical outbursts, depression, hurt feelings, always putting the needs of husband and children first and losing their true selves by doing so, feeling responsible for the feelings and happiness of others, these were all me. Before anyone reads this book I recommend that they start with THE DANCE OF ANGER first, an excellent book that literally saved my life, followed by THE DANCE OF INTIMACY, THE MOTHER DANCE, and THE DANCE OF DECEPTION. "WOMEN IN THERAPY" is geared more toward a level of professional psychology and is not a book that I would recommend women start out with. I have not read the "Dance of Connection" yet but am looking forward to it.

Harriet Lerners book Women in therapy was a further step for me (a sociology student) into understanding (?) what the social origins of the oppositional pair - man/woman, are. Lerner explains how the social reproduction of gender(through upbringing etc), to this day, still molds women into stereotypes. This in turn, is the root of many psychological problems that women can develope. The book covers all kinds of social situations and case-studies. If you're interested in gender-issues, this book is for you. // If you want to furher explore the way that language reproduces gender see Miller/Swift "Words and Women"//

I was born in 1975. I am now a wife, a mother and a therapist and I was not able to relate to this book. I think this is a good thing though. Women have come a LONG way. For its time, this was probably a great work, but 30-40 years later it could only be read for nostalgia's sake or as an insight to what our mother's (emotional) lives were like.