Memoirs by Therapists

Kim Chernin, A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and its Shadow (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).

Kim Chernin is a therapist best known for her feminist books on eating disorders. I found this book about her own experiences as a client useful for two things. One was her very strong sense of different selves, in particular of being different people over time, though not DID. The other was her vision of a different role for the therapist, as an affirming listener, not as an authority. Much of the book is in a Freudian context, but she is moving away from that.

Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

This is the best-written book I have read in a long time (and I read highbrow fiction, not just this stuff). It is memoir of the author's struggle with Bipolar Disorder (Manic Depression), but a particularly well-informed one because the author is a professor of psychology specializing in mood disorders. It is particularly eloquent on the author's struggle to come to terms with the need for medication--I think it would be valuable to anyone dealing with such issues. I found it valuable to me particularly for her struggle to separate who she was from the negative (and positive) effects of her illness.

Alice Miller, Pictures of a Childhood (New York: Meridian, 1995, first published in Germany in 1985, this translation first published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986).

This book includes a short discussion on the importance of creativity in healing pain from childhood and then 66 watercolor paintings done by Miller to explore her childhood feelings. She communicates well how radically she has chosen to trust the child inside her.

Annie G. Rogers, A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy (New York: Penguin Books, 1995).

I think this is a beautiful book. Rogers tells the story of her own breakdown--of the therapy that failed her and the therapy that finally helped her. She interweaves that story with the story of her experiences in her clinical internship in psychology, particularly her relationship with one boy whose therapy triggered many of her issues. This is primarily a book about the therapy process and therapy relationships, and it is a moving call for therapists to learn from their clients, not think that they have all the answers. Rogers provides few details of her trauma, which included hospitalization as a baby and then sexual abuse by both her mother and her father. She acknowledges multiple personalities but does not see issues relating to DID as central to her healing process. I recommend this book particularly to people who have felt failed by therapists and to DIDers interested in careers in counseling or psychology.

Lauren Slater, Welcome to My Country: A Therapist's Memoir of Madness (New York: Anchor Books, 1997, first published by Random House in 1996).

The majority of this book deals with Slater's experience as a young therapist working mostly with male schizophrenics. However, she refers to her own experience with eating disorders in one chapter and then in the last chapter deals more fully with her own experience. She was hospitalized repeatedly as a teenager, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (she implies that today the diagnosis might be severe post-traumatic stress disorder or DID). She describes her abuse in an impressionistic way, but it appears to have included sexual abuse by her mother, who eventually abandoned her. She credits her recovery primarily to the faith and hope her foster mother had for her.

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