Lying On The Couch: A Novel

by Irvin D. Yalom

“Was I too important? No, Dr. Lash, the therapist can’t be too important early in therapy. Even Freud used the strategy of trying to replace a psychoneurosis with a transference neurosis—that’s a powerful way of gaining control over destructive symptoms.

Process is the therapist’s magic amulet, always effective in times of impasse. It is the therapist’s most potent trade secret, the one procedure that makes talking to a therapist materially different and more effective than talking to a close friend.

Ernest, like all therapists, hated to give direct advice—it was a no-win situation: if it worked, you infantilized the patient; if it failed, you looked like a jerk. But in this instance he had no choice.

“You know, it’s been said that the goal of therapy is to become one’s own mother and father.

The point, the one and only point, is to act always in the patient’s behalf.

Seymour said we must show patients that we eat our own cooking, that the more open, the more genuine we become, the more they will follow suit.

Ernest felt jammed. This woman was unpredictable. He had not anticipated such rough sailing for his maiden voyage of total disclosure, and was strongly tempted to head for the calm waters of analytic neutrality. He knew that course by rote: it would be simple enough to say, “I wonder why you’re asking these questions,” or “I wonder what your fantasies are about my being in the singles world.” But such devious neutrality, such inauthenticity, was precisely what Ernest had vowed to avoid. What to do?

To be transparent does not mean to be a slave to all the patient’s whims and flights of curiosity.

But then he did something few therapists would: he openly discussed his feelings toward each person in the group. Not whether he liked or loved each person, of course—such global responses were never useful—but which characteristics of each drew him closer and which pushed him away.

to fail to explore erotic transference would be analogous to summoning a spirit from the spirit world and then sending it away without asking it a single question.

“The truth got me into this and the truth will get me out.”