Life in the Consulting Room: Portraits

This book offers a series of noteworthy vignettes that occurred in the author’s consulting room. Although the context and objective of each consultation varied, the decision to present them here is due to a particularly interesting feature of the patient’s life or a significant point that arose during their interview with the author. Many of the cases have issues of academic interest but these are not pursued here. Instead, these accounts should be seen as portraits, “snapshots” that were considered emotionally interesting and intellectually stimulating. Some of these patients were in short or long-term therapy, but most cases were being assessed to determine whether psychotherapy was in fact the best way of helping them. No doubt all psychodynamic practitioners will have met some of these findings in their practice, but the present book offers a particularly significant collection of clinical episodes.

Two of the book’s chapters describe original findings of the author: one describes patients who struggle with an unconscious feeling of “non-entitlement” to fulfil their potential. The other puts forward a hypothesis to explain why some men are incapable to have effective penetrative sex. A further chapter contains medical students’ reports of their learning experiences.