Overview
In recent years, psychotherapy has become a widely accepted and even popular form of treatment for mental and emotional troubles. Whether seeking guidance, comfort, help, or just some small measure of peace, more people than ever are going, to the therapist's couch for the "talking cure." The literary artist is no exception. In fact, the writer — whose life in many cases serves as inspiration for his or her work — is in an ideal position to evaluate the experience.
In this fascinating, revealing, and profoundly intimate volume, editor Jason Shinder has collected the personal reminiscences of some of the greatest writers today, all of whom have been to the therapist's couch and now offer valuable insight into the process. Adam Gopnik wryly discusses what was "easily one of the most unsuccessful psychoanalyses ever attempted" by an eccentric New York Freudian. Pam Houston offers a riveting account of the revolutionary technique that brought her back from the brink of madness. Mark Doty poignantly chronicles how therapy, and a trip to the Serengeti, awakened him to the truth that — while his marriage was dead — his future was still very much alive. And Susan Cheever takes a humorous look at psychotherapy through the eyes of a lifelong patient.
From poet and memoirist David Mura's serious concern that therapy in America fails patients of color to George Plimpton's health skepticism about the entire process — from one writer who is joyous at the prospect of getting two therapists for the price of one to another who likens therapy to baseball, finding special comfort in Willie Mays — these essays are by turns funny, introspective, inspiring, disquieting, thoughtful, often provocative, and always entertaining.
In this remarkable anthology of essays — many never before published — seventeen award-winning poets, playwrights, and writers confront depression, addiction, troubled pasts, and mental instability. In addition, they probe the effects of psychotherapy, from pivotal to nonexistent, on their lives — as well as on the storytelling process itself. The result is a remarkably well-written, deeply revealing journey into the psyches of some of America's premier literary talents.
Editorials
From The Critics
In this book of essays, contemporary writers, such as Mark Doty and Adam Gopnik, examine their literary lives through the lens of therapy. Writer and performance artist David Mura suggests that counseling actually works against art even as he acknowledges that therapy transformed his troubled life. George Plimpton and Susan Cheever keep enough distance between themselves and their analysis to scrutinize the experience; other contributors remain caught up in the breathy intimacy of transference. Still, all of them wrestle with the problem Lucy Grealy identifies in the book's most resonant sentence: "What is boorish or hackneyed on paper can be profound and life-changing in reality." And with all their real or imagined psychological problems, most of these essayists seem burdened by, well, boorish notions of specialness, whether it's novelist Ntozake Shange's sense that she could reach areas of her unconscious that others could not, or Pam Houston's preoccupation with her GRE analytical scores. It's a self-styled self-absorption writers often possess, and which accounts for creativity, loneliness and the nagging fear (often evident here) that well-adjusted people make lousy artists. But that vanity also marks a largely unacknowledged irony: These "unique" stories frequently run together and become indistinguishable. The predictable Manhattan backdrops; the relentless self-dramatization; the dysfunctional families. Like therapy itself, the book is by turns exhausting and bracing. It's a gush of collective writer-ego that pummels with the force of a fire hose.—Jeff Ousborne