The Man With The Beautiful Voice: And More Stories from the Other Side of the Couch

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully crafted short stories
Review: Dr Rubin's stories are drawn from her clinical practice and her experience with her patients. The reader meets Eve Gordon who endured a harrowing childhood with her alcoholic parents; now 39, she lives a life of virtual isolation and desperately wants to become her therapist's friend. Many sessions are spent with Eve curled up in the corner of the practice without uttering a single word. Bruce Marins, a cripple - a "Thalidomide baby", a drug taken by his mother to cure her morning sickness - who rejects sympathy as being patronising, who feels anger and distrust of people around him and who sees deceit, pity and rejection wherever he turns. As Dr Rubin is about to greet Bonnie Paulsen and Jerry Stillman in her office, she is far from picturing the way these two patients are going to deceive her with their egregious lies and carefully plotted hoax - "How easily any patient can defeat even the most artful and accomplished therapist." she writes! Jake Garvin suffers from manic-depressive psychosis and so needs help because he's having trouble writing his dissertation for his degree. This is all the more urgent since the two job offers Jake has received depend on his finishing his dissertation. A case which will unfortunately end very tragically. Richard Durbin and Valerie Goldner are a yuppie couple. But why does Richard stubbornly refuse to have a child with Valerie? What mysterious event in his past makes him refuse to become a father? And finally there is the case of Delfina Ortega, a Mexican American, who was pregnant at 16, then became an excellent high school student graduating near the top of her class, who was subsequently awarded full scholarship to the university and then, when she was accepted to a graduate programme in Latin American history, she falls into a panic attack.
Dr Rubin's cases are a wonderful read for those of us who are mere laymen in the field of psychology.

Rating:
Summary: Five Stars
Review: Dr. Rubin explains that there are a set of rules regarding the relationship between a patient and doctor and how she sometimes broke the rules to help her patients. She shows the soul-searching and thought processes that go into the decision to break the rules by describing interactions with some of her patients. She does a great job of describing these cases, building the tension for the reader who is wondering why the patient has come in for therapy; there is always a big payoff when the secret trauma suffered by each patient is revealed. This is a very short book and I found myself wishing it was longer. I could easily read 400 pages + of these gripping stories. The human drama never ceases to be interesting and the author has a talent for writing in simple yet artistic prose.