Book 37

Day 26:

No snowboarding today, the conditions were just too chancy to risk it, but I still had a very lovely relaxing day and evening. I was still in a very intellectual mood today and continued to want to read psychology related books. I'm not sure if it is because now most of my friends have started back to school and new classes with new opportunities to learn. I may not have always loved some of the rigors of school, but I always loved learning. For me reading is a form of learning, and I'm learning a lot.

Book 37: A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy

Author: Dr. Annie G. Rogers
Genre: Psychology, Nonfiction
Pages: 336
Series: No
Purchased or Borrowed: Borrowed from the library through Marina
Date Read: January 26, 2013

4.5 stars
I loved this book! It was a story of a young female psychotherapist, Annie Rogers, who is doing her clinical internship at a school for disturbed children in Chicago. While there she meets a  troubled young boy named Ben who was abandoned by his mother, and then removed from his first foster family after they left him in the house during a fire as an infant. But Annie has problems of her own, painful and forgotten memories from her childhood and her parents, several personas in her head, as well as a difficult and strained relationship with her own therapist. It is eventually this relationship that causes her own breakdown and hospitalization. After a two month stay and finding a new psychoanalyst, Blumenfeld, she begins to deal with her own feelings related to her father and mother's sexual abuse and her therapist's abandonment. She returns to Ben, and they begin to heal together through play encounters with both learning and growing from the other, in that a child who was though to be untreatable has developed a mutual attachment bond with someone.

This book was uncommonly rewarding and fascinating for me to read. First, her interactions with Ben were my favorite part of the book. I love children and want to work with similar cases and their play interactions and the things it told Annie were really interesting. The reader is also able to see Annie dig herself out of her own hole and become the person that she was meant to be. Her therapists never focused on clinical diagnoses but merely got to know the whole person, which is something I hope to do myself. And due to my own experiences I always enjoy reading about people who have gained success in the psychological field after struggling with their own problems. The only thing that annoyed be about this book was occasionally when she described her own neuroses, the language was difficult to understand and felt a little superfluous. Otherwise, it was a breeze to read, well-written but readable, which to me is the best kind of book.

I started another psychology related book tonight but I think I'm going to break for sleep early tonight because I think I need it and finish it tomorrow. Funny how early for me is 1am haha. I also need to tackle a very fat book that is due in two days and has no renewals, eek!

xo,
Erin