A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy

by Annie G. Rogers

Overview

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactlty what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."—The Los Angeles Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781440621093
Publisher:	Temple Publications International, Inc.
Publication date:	08/01/1996
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	454 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Annie G. Rogers is the professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Hampshire College as well as being on the faculty of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco. She is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship in Ireland, a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, and a Whiting Fellowship at Hampshire College. She is the author of A Shining Affliction, The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma, as well as many other works, both fiction and nonfiction.

Table of Contents

A Shining AfflictionI. The Other Side Of Silence

II. Silence

III. Messenger

IV. Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Rogers pulls us with disarming directness into her treatment, during her psychiatric internship, of a severely traumatized five-year-old boy. The touching appeal of the interactions between them then propel us into the frightening core of Rogers' book--her own rapid decline into psychosis and institutionalization. This was triggered by the child's expression of his horrifying fears and her own initial therapist's rejection of her. Only the ministrations of a second unusually gifted psychoanalyst helped Rogers reassemble her shattered psyche. The multifaceted, two-way healing that occurred between the young intern struggling for emotional truth and the "untreatable" child finally enabled Rogers to recall the searing pain and frustration she experienced and challenge some of modern psychotherapy's basic tenets. Although mostly straightforward enough, Rogers leaves curiously unexamined the aborted relationship with her first, rejecting therapist, which makes her account jarringly incomplete despite its overall mesmerizing force.

Whitney Scott