|
|
(Larger Image)
|
A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy
by Annie G. Rogers
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (1996-08-01)
ISBN: 0140240128
EAN: 9780140240122
Dewy Decimal #: 616
Paperback: 336 pages
SKU: 29420
Condition: Like New
Comments: THE SOFTBACK BOOK! PENGUIN, 1996. THE UNABRIDGED 1ST EDITION. REPRINT. SOFTCOVER BOOK AND PAGES ARE FINE! Rapid shipping w/FREE tracking. GREAT PACKAGING . Air Mail. YELLOW DOT.
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Product Description
In this brave, inconoclastic, and utterly unique book, a Harvard professor of human delvelopment and psychology chronicles her her personal drama as a young psychology intern assigned to treat a severely disturbed five-year-old boy. Powerful and poignant, A Shining Affliction is not only beautifully written story of a soul, but an important challenge to psychotherapy as it is practiced today.
|
Customer Reviews
|
Great Author
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-09-17
I have read two of her books now and neither of them were at all disapointing. She revels her whole self in this book and I find it amazing that she was able to get through all of what happen to her. It was intresting to see how her work with the young boy brought up her old baggage and she was able to make it through that. Very good book and hard to put down.
|
|
Healing is always two-sided
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-05-04
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Annie's realization that "healing is always two-sided" seems to capture the heart and soul of the therapeutic relationship. Her artfully written narrative shows how "what has been wounded in a relationship must be, after all, healed in a relationship."
Her healing therapeutic relationships--both as a therapist and as a client--help Annie begin to move beyond the damage of her past traumatic relationships. Annie convincingly demonstrates the therapist's own sense of vulnerability has the potential to bring either tragic harm or human healing to the client. She beautifully summarizes this realization with her advice to therapists: "If it is possible to remain open to our fears and make reparations for our mistakes, our vulnerability can be used in the service of healing."
|
|
powerful, beautiful, evoking
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-02-19
7 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
I began this book because I am a student of Annie's. I could not put it down, feeling like I myself was becoming somehow involved with her relationship with Ben (the 5 year old boy with brown hair and bangs). I felt like I was getting inside both Annie and Ben while watching the beautiful way in which they interacted. I could not be in the room with this book without wanting to read on into the relationship that evolves. The personal aspect of the patient-therapist relationship becomes the center focus as does Annie's life outside of these interactions with Ben. The reflection, time, energy, and exposure that is demonstrated by the author in this book was by far the best I have ever seen. This has become my favorite book, one that I will never live without, and also one that will remind me of what I want to do with my life and how to do it.
|
|
The Prevalence of Dismal Psychotherapists
Rating  (4)
Date: 2002-09-30
13 out of 17 customers found this reveiw helpful
Harvard child psychologist and severe child abuse survivor Annie Rogers suffered psychiatric hospitalizations once or twice a year from puberty until her late twenties -- when, after a six year insidiously inept and crazymaking "therapy," an attempt to stab and shoot that therapist and one last hospitalization for another word salad psychosis (and no more insurance), her exceptional and no doubt desperate sister and friends found the gifted and pro bono analyst Dr. Blumenfeld. If this exceptional memoir hasn't become a classic must read in psychology with many reviews by both patients and therapists by now, there are unfortunate reasons. One is that Annie's politically correct adolescence shows in her disdain for the "medical models and diagnoses" Dr. Blumenfeld himself could afford to abandon only because he knew them and the blind therapists who live by them so well -- and thus could authentically reach and stabilize the talented and brilliant, borderline and psychotic personality and doctoral intern Annie. "You have a kind of giftedness, Annie, that probably has always been inseparable from your suffering, and we don't know very much about that yet." What we need now is a wonderful book from the exceptional and sainted Dr. Blumenfeld and more from the healed and gifted writer Dr. Rogers on the two sided magic of play therapy with children. You must meet Annie's beloved "oppositional" 5 year old patient Ben and ponder the 7 foot angel "Theosporus" who protected and accompanied Annie from age 6 to Dr. Blumenfeld's office at 27. A Shining Affliction raises more questions than it answers -- it might have been twice as long, and it's hard to tell if important details were deliberately or unconsciously left out. As it is, it's a daring memoir by a once psychotic Harvard child psychologist that should be a controversial must read classic in both child and adult psychotherapy.
|
|
a strong memoir
Rating (5)
Date: 2001-09-01
10 out of 23 customers found this reveiw helpful
At its best it reminded me strongly of I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, in that it shows the healing relationship between an excellent therapist and a disturbed female patient. This book had the added benefit of having the patient/author also be a therapist, and while being healed herself doing a marvelous job of participating in the healing of a young boy whose problems are remarkably similar to her own.
The book was beautifully written, very open and revealing, and gentle in its nature. I also was grateful to hear the author write of her experiences with a TERRIBLE therapist, who, for self-protection, violated therapeutic boundaries left and right and essentially drove the author mad.
Well worth the read.
|
|
|
|
|