Tales from the Couch

I like reading books on psychotherapy and neurology. How people behave according to their frame of reference, chemical make up or gene inheritance interests me. I thought this book was something rather different and might be interesting. <br /><br />1. The majority of the psychology books I read are by doctors with a Jewish background. This doctor is Roman Catholic and his background does inform certain of his patients' treatments.<br /><br />2. Most of the authors owe a lot to Freud, Dr. Wendorf is contemptuous of him. Freudian therapists like to get to the root of the problem, Wendorf is strictly behavioural. Cognitive behavioural therapy to be more precise. My favourite author in this genre is Dr <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/909675.Irvin_D__Yalom" title="Irvin D. Yalom" rel="noopener">Irv Yalom</a> who had a Jewish background but was an existentialist. This comes closest I suppose to behavioural therapy but in no way is Dr Wendorf an existentialist and does not address his patients' problems from this point of view at all. <br /><br />Although I am an existentialist, I lean more to CGT as therapy than anything else. A lot of us know why we do stuff that is not making us or others happy, or don't really care, what we want is to stop doing it, do something else that is better, not 5 years of lying on a couch and talking about oneself. (Exception. My mother, she just liked talking about herself and popping valium.) Some of his treatments were interesting. The man who couldn't pee in public having to distract himself by counting back from 20, the boy with no self esteem who was taught to play ping pong and since he didn't do anything else at all, no school, no work, no treatment, became extremely good at it and thereby cured himself.<br /><br />3. In <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/843200.Oliver_Sacks" title="Oliver Sacks" rel="noopener">Oliver Sacks</a>' books, patients come alive as people who have issues, people with schizophrenia for example, and not schizophrenics. Dr Wendorf doesn't lack compassion but his description of the patients is generally only as far as it has to do with the mental problems. However, he, like Sacks does often involve the person in looking at their disorder in a quite objective way that they could treat together. <br /><br />It sounds like a really great read, but actually I was mostly bored. <br /><br />The book started off well enough, at a fast clip through patients and disorders and, Wendorf being quite a personal writer, what he thought of them, if he liked the patient or the opposite. But when he got into disorders he really enjoyed, like borderline personality disorder and multiple personalities, now called dissociative identity disorder, he just went on and on. All the patients were unattractive individuals to read about and they mostly had horrific backgrounds. The borderline personality people with their inadequacies and alternatively seductive/aggressive sides were just people you really hoped you'd never have to deal with since they don't seem able to be cured. One wonders if they even want to be.<br /><br />Some things were almost beyond belief. Like every male member of the family raping a little girl from the time she was a toddler and selling her. The grandmother would 'clean' out her vagina with lye, rendering her sterile. Or the little girl who had small dead animals put into her vagina and left to rot. I was terribly sorry for these poor women and it is no wonder they developed multiple personalities as a defence against actually having to deal with these horrific issues. But there is a limit to how much I want to read about these personalities and how the author handled them. <br /><br />In the end I kind of drifted off, skimming, just trying to finish. That's never a good sign and that's why the book only gets 3 stars.

Where to start? So many things about this book made me rage. The author's clear narcissism. The fact that this book was clearly just a vehicle to stroke his own ego and mock his patients. His inability to acknowledge that he doesn't understand - truly - what the forensic process is about. His regular notation about which clients did - or did not - pay his bill or his "very high fee." His unnecessary and regular mentions of his jaguars. His incredibly unkind characterizations of addicts. This is awful.<br /><br />I'm just glad he's not a practitioner that I have to deal with.

This book just rubbed me the wrong way right from the beginning. I set the book down twice for a while to try and clear my mind a bit and come back to it without my irritation, but failed. I finished it, but hated it.<br /><br />I am going to write about some specific examples, but in case you don't want to read through all of them, here is the general idea: his stories are a bit unempathetic and egocentric. I have heard many psychologists tell tales of their patients. Some of which were funny stories told to entertain, some which were not. Sometimes they were just looking for advice or sympathy or even just to vent frustration. Some stories were books, some were told at conferences or presentations and some were just shared socially. I don't feel like I've ever really gotten the impression that a psychologist was mocking their patients until this book (with the exception of a few patients Robert Hare has told stories about). Also, he takes every opportunity to mention his various classic cars and whether or not that particular patient paid him his bill (or if he did the talk pro bono or not). Obviously since he wrote the book, he is mostly telling his success stories, but quite a few don't sound very successful at all. Sure they stopped coming in, but I would have too if you were charging me by the hour for that kind of service. <br /><br />His introduction started out quite promising. He wants to tell some stories about some of his most memorable and/entertaining patients. He clarifies that he will use terminology that colloquially may have become offensive but were proper clinical terms once upon a time. I liked that distinction especially because people have this idea that a diagnosis is like a bad label, but this is really a colloquial idea that clinical psychology keeps having to rebrand and run away from. <br /><br />After this, I started to turn on him. He talks about ADHD and how he never likes to use medication over therapy, except Ritalin, which is great. And it can be for some people, sure. He then goes on to talk down the idea or argument of the problem of overprescribing Ritalin. Then he tells a story about a father who functioned totally fine until he got a desk job and now he's restless and going crazy. His son is ADHD and Ritalin helped so why not him too?! That would be a good example of unnecessarily prescribing a drug considering he did function totally fine in the other job. Sounds like a lifestyle change could have probably sorted that out actually.<br /><br />Then his whole take on suicide was pretty discouraging. He talks about how with most suicide attempts they don't really want to die. That is usually true. They are lost and desperate and they don't know what to do and they do this because they want help but they don't know how or where or who. Fine Bob, with you so far. Then he precedes to imply that these are just the irrational impulses of silly teenagers (usually due to a break-up) and really they are so silly and stupid you just need to point out their silliness and they'll be on their way. Yes Bob, because normal and healthy functioning teenagers try to kill themselves every time a break-up occurs. That's how well functioning people react to that situation. Definitely no underlying issues there. <br /><br /><br />His take on discipline. Yes, this is important to teach any child, however he seems unable to differentiate between discipline and violence. He encourages the parents to discipline their child using threats of violence (and then of course you must follow through if they do not listen). The one woman threatened her son with a switch, and he considered that success. Did it produce results? Sure. Did it produce further psychological dysfunction? Probably.<br /><br />I have more issues with the book, but I am running out of time. I have places to go and people to see, all of which I would prefer to do over continuing to write about a book I really didn't enjoy.<br /><br />

If you have a mental illness yourself, definitely don't read this book. You will be offended. In fact, don't read this book if you're neurotypical either, because it's awful. I can't believe this guy was ever a practicing therapist. Most books written by psychologists about their patients are done so in a way meant to educate readers about mental illness. This book came across mostly as exploitative rather than informative, presenting stories of patients merely as entertainment. 'Haha listen to what this crazy person did!' He casually refers to patients are "crazy" multiple times. (There's an entire chapter titled "Truly Crazy People.") He also refers to patients in crisis as "making for an entertaining therapy session." Or if their crisis isn't "entertaining" enough for him, instead he talks about how annoying certain people were to deal with. It felt like this guy had no compassion for his patients and found his job to be a huge burden, in which case why even bother staying in such a line of work? The chapter on suicide in particular was exceptionally heartless - constantly accusing the patients of being selfish, stupid, and having "silly" or even "comical reasons" for wanting to end their life. In one early chapter, he basically mocks a patient for thinking that owning a Jaguar is the pinnacle of success, and then in subsequent chapters proceeds to (repeatedly) name-drop the fact that he owns a Jaguar himself. Some of his insensitivity you might try to write off as a sign of the times, being that he clearly did the majority of his work in the 1970s when the field of psychology still had some very questionable practices. But the cumulative amount of this insensitivity, and the fact that he wrote the book in 2015 and should have learned better by now, makes it unforgivable overall.

OH BOY HERE WE GO. I can't remember the last time a book made me this angry. It started out promisingly enough. There were some interesting cases. The author's approach to mental health seemed a bit old fashioned but then he is now retired. Then real doubts crept in: his chuckling at the ethical standards of the profession. His disdain for "silly" suicidal people. His frankly creepy need to describe how attractive his female clients are, including speculation about whether one of them had had a boob job. <br /><br />It got worse. There's a common belief in Psychology - now fortunately going out of fashion - that you don't need to bother with evidence as long as you have some vaguely coherent notion about how something works. I found myself wanting to yell at the book WHERE'S THE EVIDENCE FOR YOUR POSITION as he wanked on about the inner causes of BPD and narcissism. <br /><br />And then he went on to MPD and the satanic panic and I realised he was one of the original professionals responsible and that's when I got really angry. I understand that the guy was acting in good faith at the time. He was misguided but so were a lot of people. But the science of how memory works has come along so far since then, and so many claims of ritual abuse have been investigated and found unfounded, and so many have been retracted, that any therapist who still propagates this bullshit is absolutely culpable. He wants to know why the rate of MPD has dropped in the last 20 years? Because the late 1990s is when doubts crept in and therapists stopped expecting to see it, newspapers, magazines and TV stopped going on about it, and The Courage to Heal dropped off the bestseller lists. That's why. <br /><br />So we get a long list of horrific acts of abuse, the descriptions of which are as gratuitous as the acts themselves are implausible. His message to any doubting reader is "bad things happen. The Holocaust happened." Yes. The Holocaust happened. But the reason why I believe that it happened is that there's evidence for it. Nobody has found any evidence of Satanic ritual abuse rings. And we're not talking about the kind of crime that leaves no physical trace. With the specific crimes mentioned (I won't go into details) we're talking about a situation where absence of evidence really is evidence of absence. <br /><br />So basically yeah. I didn't like this one.

"Tales From The Couch" by Dr Bob Wendorf is a story based on events from medical psychology, daily work of psychiatrists. This book has inspired me, and it took great pleasure to listen to it on Audible narrated by Bob Reed. I found this book was well written and an excellent read.

Wow, this guy is awful. He has some extremely dated and sometimes just downright offensive views on a number of topics including autism (couldn’t possibly want friends if you’re autistic), bulimia (it’s a fad that’s gone out of fashion), addiction (simultaneously both a terrible thing to be afflicted with and also your own fault, he particularly doesn’t like working with addicts) and a host of other diagnoses which i’d really expect a clinical psychologist to have a more rounded view on. His case examples tended to be too short and either lacked an outcome or he quickly ‘cured’ people with some unproved bit of made up reverse psychology. He clearly loves himself but I feel seriously sorry for anyone who he ends up working with, as he seems like an unskilled asshole.

2.5 stars<br /><br />This book sits somewhere in the middle for me, very interesting patient cases but the doctor himself is very questionable, often makes weird comments about his patients ? the book almost feels like an ongoing testament to his self pandering of his ego.

2.5 stars!<br /><br />When I started this book, I thought the author was a bit of a dick, lacks compassion and I was tempted to throw it out, but I persisted. This is reflected in some<br />of the other reviews here too. But, I’ve changed my mind a little bit as the book went on, I think he genuinely cared for his patients but could have organised the book in a better way that doesn’t rub readers up the wrong way from the start… a better editor would have realised this! <br /><br />It was certainly interesting to read about some of the cases encountered by the author in clinical practice, and a good amount of research, criticality of the diagnostic system and I learnt a thing or two from his takes on situations and people (I’m also a psychologist, PhD). <br /><br />Some of the comments about patients, especially about their looks, should have not been reported, and there’s some repetitions about stories/anecdotes. Again, it could have definitely done with a better editor. <br /><br />Probably wouldn’t recommend to others, as there’s far better books out there with a similar brief, such as the skeleton cupboard.

Interesting book but I was surprised to see it was written in 2015. Between recommendations for spanking children, references to “bastard” (illegitimate) children, “inappropriate“ homosexual relationships, it seemed horrendously anachronistic. His judgemental attitude towards some patients, and obvious narcissism, were oftentimes difficult to read.