Secrets in Psychotherapy: Stories that Inform Clinical Work
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : April 2025
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 216
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Individual Psychotherapy - Catalogue No : 97996
- ISBN 13 : 9781032749235
- ISBN 10 : 1032749237
Also by Kathryn J. Zerbe
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This book brings together contemporary perspectives from psychodynamic treatment, advances in cognitive science, medicine, and neuroscience in a user-friendly format to guide the beginning to more advanced practitioner in working with secrets that emerge during psychotherapy.
Despite their ubiquity in life and in clinical practice, secrets and secret-keeping receive limited attention in the training and skill set required for mental health clinicians. Drawing on personal experience and clinical expertise as well as film, memoir, and literature, Dr. Kathryn Zerbe shares how secrets come to light in life and within treatment and demonstrates the powerful hold that secrets can have on our lives. This book offers a fresh take on how we view our secrets, and how we can use them as a tool to sustain our most intimate and valued connections over the course of a lifetime. Using cutting-edge research as well as honed clinical expertise, the author suggests how one might go about managing the secrets of everyday living that we must keep as well as how we can identify which we can let go. Particular attention is paid to the mind/body relationship and somatic countertransference reactions. Each chapter suggests guidelines to promote wellness and resilience in the secret keeper, whether that be the psychotherapist or their patient.
Written with compassion and in a user-friendly style, Secrets in Psychotherapy will benefit anyone who is navigating the thorny terrain of keeping a secret for themselves or someone they know. It is an essential read for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and practicing mental health professionals of all disciplines.
Reviews and Endorsements
Kathryn Zerbe, the internationally recognized psychoanalytic authority on eating disorders, turns her attention in this book to the topic of secrets. The result is truly exceptional since her book is serious and rigorously anchored in theory while being a relentless page-turner. Replete with clinical, social, and personal anecdotes of secret keeping and its attendant emotional burdens on mind and body, the text is at one moment poignant and heart-breaking and the next witty and amusing. In lesser hands, writing about secret sexual experiences, cloistered memories of abuse, extramarital affairs, hidden bank accounts, untold adoptions, and the like could easily turn tawdry, but Zerbe persistently retains impeccable ethics and sober cadence that safeguard her subjects' privacy and dignity with great care. Above all, she delineates practical, palpably thoughtful, and humane strategies to help those who are carrying their own or someone else's secrets much to their suffering. To put it bluntly, this is psychoanalysis at its best!
Salman Akhtar, MD. Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Jefferson Medical College. Training & Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. Author of Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
Zerbe, in her talented and artful way, gently peels back the layers of fear, hurt, loyalty, betrayal, and shame that form the loam of secret-keeping. She shows us the toll secret-keeping takes on our minds, and our bodies. She shines light on the ghosts of family members, who live within us and constrain our creativity when we become an unwitting vault for their secrets. She delineates ways to face secrets ethically and emerge more whole. This is original, perspective-changing work—compassionate, and experience near, filled with personal examples. You will find yourself and your patients inside its pages, in unexpected places, and your therapeutic work will be strengthened because of it.
Mary Jo Peebles, Ph.D, ABPP—Psychoanalyst, and author of Beginnings and When Psychotherapy Feels Stuck
There is no hiding it: from the first page Zerbe dives into the colorful and transformative world of secrets, keeping us riveted, our curiosities peaked, our appetites wet, as she explores and navigates the tension between holding things hidden and our desire to reveal. In doing so, Zerbe illustrates how a clinical process begins with a ‘secret reveal’ that, in its deconstruction, can forge a new path forward as structural change within the mindbody or bodymind becomes possible. Secrets and secret keeping are akin to symptoms---often used as maladaptive solutions to problems in living that feel unbearable. These exhumed secrets can become narrative links, often providing a missing piece to an emotional puzzle made up, perhaps, of only what’s been sort-of-known. Drawing on years of clinical experience and her creative imaginative talents, Zerbe sheds a bright new light on secrets, ghosts, their relationship to intergenerational traumas, and the interpersonal felt experience of sharing all with an other. This joint unpacking brings a multitude of feeling states—some welcome, some not—but ultimately freeing and unburdening. Zerbe is on to something, as secrets might just be more illuminating than our dreams.
Jean Petrucelli, Ph.D.; CEDS-S. Training & Supervising Analyst, The William Alanson White Institute; NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Editor of Body-States: Interpersonal/Relational Perspectives on the Treatment of Eating Disorders
Kathryn Zerbe’s new book, The Psychotherapy of Secrets: Stories that inform Life and Clinical Work, is a fascinating and invaluable exploration of the place of secrets in the psychotherapeutic process. As Freud wrote, “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret.” Zerbe’s volume helps us to grasp the themes around which secrets tend to organize themselves in clinical practice and the emotional and physical impact of secrecy on our patients and their families. I especially appreciated her exploration of secrets as ‘unwanted ghosts’ that may haunt families for generations. As she illustrates, these hidden truths drive unconscious experiences that cannot be assimilated and mourned and from which psychotherapy may provide relief. Her book brings these ideas to life through vivid, in-depth case studies and the most skillful use of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, making it a must-read for practicing clinicians.
Tom Wooldridge, PsyD, ABPP, CEDS-C, FIPA. Associate Professor and Chair, Psychology, Golden Gate University and Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Being entrusted with a secret is a gift, but Dr. Zerbe knows well how being a keeper of secrets can be a burden. Her writing as well as her practice is therapeutic. This book combines wisdom acquired over a lifetime with psychoanalytic perspectives to lighten the reader’s burden of secret keeping. A master storyteller, Dr Zerbe elucidates the prominent, intriguing, and problematic parts that secrets play in human life. You’ll be a wiser therapist for having read it.
Jon G. Allen, Ph.D., is Clinical Professor, Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine, Voluntary Faculty in Houston, TX, and author of Trusting in Psychotherapy
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. The Power of Secrets
2. The Burden of Secrecy
3. The Afterlife of a Double Life
4. Discovering, Phantoms and Ghosts
5. Somatic Countertransference
6. The Complicated Ethics of Concealment
7. Hidden Talents and Abilities
Epilogue
About the Author(s)
Kathryn J. Zerbe, MD, FABP, is a Training and Supervising Analyst, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Oregon Health and Sciences University. She practices in Portland, OR.
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