Popular Psychology

Kim Chernin, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women's Lives (New York: Viking, 1998)

Kim Chernin tells the stories of women who have redefined their relationships with their mothers. Some of the stories are very striking; Chernin believes that women must first get past their longing for their mother, but then many of these women go back from their new position of strength and transform some pretty dysfunctional relationships. Chernin wants to present stories, not theory, and I found the book a bit scattered because she does not give her theoretical ideas a central organizing role. But the stories will stay with me.

Susan Forward and Craig Buck, Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and Its Devastation (New York: Penguin, 1988, first published by J. P. Tarcher, Inc., in 1978).

This is a reasonable book, and does include chapters on mother-son and mother-daughter incest, as well as the more common combinations. The author is a big fan of psychodrama, and her examples of how it can be used in the healing process are interesting. I also liked her anthropological discussion of incest. However, the book seems dated in its emphasis on the symptoms shown by survivors (particularly problems in relationships), not on the healing process. The author still assumes that multiple personalities are rare. Susan Forward was apparently Nichole Simpson's therapist (I got that information from this page, but be cautious--the page I have linked is ok but it is part of a site that includes pornographic material).

Jennifer J. Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).

This book is written for professionals, but it has a respectful rather than an objective tone (and Jennifer Freyd is a survivor herself, though she does not tell her story). She argues that the more the child depends on the abuser for survival (for example, if the abuser is a parent), the more likely that the child will not remember the abuse. This book really helped me understand the feelings of betrayal involved in abuse by someone who I trusted and depended on.

John Friel and Linda Friel, An Adult Child's Guide to What's "Normal" (Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 1990).

I expected this book to give more specific advice than it does--somehow I think I expected it to tell me how to make conversation at a cocktail party. But it is a good summary of basic advice about how to build a functional family if all you have known is a disfunctional one. Now that I am looking at it I want to read it again--there is so much there about how to avoid destructive patterns. If you don't like reading endless self-help books about codependency, boundaries, anger, etc., it is all here in brief but convincing form.

Maxine Harris, The Loss That Is Forever: The Lifelong Impact of the Early Death of a Mother or Father (New York: Plume Books, 1996, first published by Dutton, 1995).

I felt initially that this book made too much of the impact of the loss of a parent, but she convinced me that I have not taken seriously enough the loss of my father. This not quite a self-help book, but an attempt by a therapist to categorize the different ways in which children can react to the death of a parent and how that loss affects them as they grow up She uses stories from interviews to illustrate all her points. Quite a hopeful book, showing the very different ways in which people can find meaning and hope.

Alice Miller, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: The Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth (New York: Dutton, 1991).

I gather this book is Alice Miller's clearest statement of her view that healing repressed childhood abuse is the most important task of therapy, but I didn't like it as much as Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. She is clearly frustrated by the resistance of psychoanalysts to her previous books on the importance of child abuse.

Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984).

This book is organized around an argument against the Freudian Drive Theory, but I found it very helpful because the point she wants to make is that actual childhood abuse is the most important thing. She emphasizes that anger at parents is ok and in fact healing, and criticizes those who would minimize it. Miller believes that abuse is often not remembered or misremembered, but she believes that inaccurate memories always hide memories of something worse.

Richard A. Moskovitz, Lost in the Mirror: An Inside Look at Borderline Personality Disorder (Dallas TX: Taylor Publishing Co., 1996.

This is a self-help book by a professional for people with borderline personality disorder. He says that most, but not all, borderlines have been sexually abused as children, and he identifies dissociation and lack of a coherent identity as key symptoms of BPD. He even says: "I believe that Dissociative Identity Disorder represents an extreme along the spectrum of dissociative experiences that characterize BPD." (p. 176) In other words, what he means by BPD is probably the same pattern that other therapists call mid-continuum dissociative disorder. I believe that his approach is less useful than the mid-continuum approach, because he wants clients to focus from the beginning on the continuity between their parts instead of loving and healing the separate parts first before trying to put them together. But his approach is certainly better than the old prejudices about borderline personality disorder, and his approach is generally caring and sensible.

Nancy J. Napier, Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children (New York: WW Norton, 1994)

A wonderful book if you like Jungian approaches, particularly if you aren't sure whether you are multiple or not. Lots of specific suggestions, many of them using guided imagery, for managing memories, functioning in the world, and healing. I read this book soon after my diagnosis and found it very helpful.

Anne Wilson Schaeff, Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science: A New Model for Healing the Whole Person (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992).

Anne Wilson Schaeff, who is probably best known for her books on codependence, writes here about how 12 step programs are better than conventional therapy. I agree with some of her criticisms of psychology, but this book did not convince me to give up on therapy. What I did find useful was her description of what she calls deep process work, which fits my experiences of processing memories and unresolved childhood feelings better than the usual discussion of abreaction. You can find more information about her approach at Beyond Therapy.

Peter C. Whybrow, A Mood Apart: Depression, Mania Other Afflictions of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

The author of this book, a research psychologist, wants most of all to get the reader to really grasp that mental illness is not primarily biological or primarily the result of experience but rather a complex mix of the two. His focus is primarily on bipolar disorder and depression. He makes his point with extended stories hybridized from the experiences of his own patients, and from reflections on his own less severe experiences. This book lacks the beautiful writing of Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind (listed above), but it does a good job of explaining a variety of issues for the lay reader. What I found most interesting is the author's reflections on how we weave our disorders into our sense of our selves and therefore find it very hard to see them as diseases that are not our fault and can be treated. If you don't like the medical/biological model at all this book is not for you, and if you know a lot about medical/biological theories you may find his explanations tedious. But it is a thoughtful and very moderate development of medical/biological ideas.

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