The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful book for a layreader
Review: I was very excited when I recently found this book. Having studied cognitive processes and most of the recent professional journal articles on memory recovery, I was very surprised that the author's theories - written in 1997 - are now being confirmed left and right! Better yet, she explains the concepts in simple ways that nearly anyone can understand. She's right; there is no Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain during therapy sessions. Clients need to be taught how their cognitive and memory processes work. Armed with that knowledge - as provided in Dr. Vaughan's book - those clients may experience the new, delicious, empowering sensation that they - not their therapists - are in control of their own minds and lives.

Rating:
Summary: One star is one too many
Review: One of the defining ways in which we might discriminate the sane from the truly deluded would be to determine whether or not the subject realizes that what he or she has written is silly irrational nonsense. Lewis Carrol was tongue-in-cheek aware that much of what he wrote was irrational nonsense; he wrote that silliness on purpose to entertain us. Dr. Susan Vaughan, on the other hand, does not have her tongue in her cheek when she insists in The Talking Cure: The Science Behind Psychotherapy that the "talking cure" she practices is "microsurgery of the mind," "neurosurgery"-not metaphorically, mind you-but literally. And she would have us believe that these 200 plus pages about her "talking cure" actually constitute genuine science rather than delusional silliness.

It would be a VERY short list of her colleague neurosurgeons and scientists at Columbia-or of any neurosurgeons or scientists from anywhere this side of the looking glass-who'd sign on to a statement that they agree that her "talking cure" therapy is real neurosurgery, or real neuroscience, or anything remotely like any kind of science, or for that matter, anything remotely like careful rational thinking.

Some 2500 years ago the Greeks reallized that it could be of some utility to construct a kind of knowing called "logos" distinct from "mythos, " and a unique mode of constructing knowledge was set in motion. Authentic science is differentiated from other kinds of thinking by a rigorous, unrelenting attention to this distinction. Novelists, poets, playwrights, songwriters, storytellers, shamans, theologians, astrologers, schizophrenics, used car salesmen, creationists, politicians, criminal defense lawyers, alien abductees, young children, and "talking cure" apologists routinely ignore any such distinction.

Rating:
Summary: Analytical without Boredom
Review: Susan makes her case very well in this intriguing book. Frankly it was exactly what I expected and was looking for ... a technical discussion of the process of change at a physiological and emotional level.

Even if you dont agree with her ideas it is hard to say she doen't present well.

Rating:
Summary: Analytical without Boredom
Review: Susan Vaugh has written a wonderful overview of the inner workings of psychotherapy. Thanks to neural plasticity, psychotherapy can, and, if successful, does change neural pathways and brain structure. Support for this may be found in the way dreams change in the course of successful psychotherapy. During REM sleep, the reticular formation is activated and, as neurons from that area are fired, habitual story themes are creanked out that reflect a client's Core Conflict (Luborsky). As successful psychotherapy progresses, dreams change; i.e., the Core Conflict changes, which in turn indicates that the neurons fired from the reticular formation are being fired in a different way, with different pathways and patterns.

Rating:
Summary: Beneath contempt
Review: This book is "science" in about the same sense that a car ad is an engineering text.

If Dr. Vaughan actually believes what she says here, Harvard ought to take back her degree. My freshman students know more about scientific method than this.

BTW, I am a strong believer in "the talking cure," but this book is no defense that any intellectually honest, aware person would ever recommend to anyone. I am just appalled. Beyond appalled.