The Study of the Mind: A Psychological Book Club discussion

Here is the first Member Pick Book Discussion!

Is anyone else reading this?

I intend to, but the copy I bought from Amazon hasn't arrived yet. I'd forgotten how frustrating it can be to wait for paper books when I'm so used to my Kindle.

I wasn't incredibly interested as I work in education, not therapy, but I could get it so quickly from the library that I decided to give it a shot.

I'll read this book soon!

This book will be for the January read as well!

I just finished reading this.. Was a mind bending read !!!

Oh, good. As a therapist myself, I'd love to see some discussion about people's thoughts on this one.

Wikrams wrote: "I just finished reading this.. Was a mind bending read !!!"

Good I am going to read it too... this discussion will go through January because of the Holidays.

Esse wrote: "Oh, good. As a therapist myself, I'd love to see some discussion about people's thoughts on this one."

Start the discussion whenever!

I've only read part one as life as been busy, but the parts that have stood out to me thus far are:

I could relate to Pipher's discussion of the relationships to pets. My cat was somewhat recently injured and the open wound is not healing and my husband cannot understand the time, energy, and money I have chosen to put into his healing. The way she described these relationships was validating in how, while I can't quite successfully describe what I get from the relationship with my cat, that there is something very important for me there.

Pipher (2003) writes, "And we have overlooked what people have known since time began: Life makes most of us unhappy" (p. 28). On one hand, I love the frank honesty of this quote, but, on the other hand, it is also deeply pessimistic and makes me a little sad. Despite the fact that I can see the honesty in the statement, there's a deep-seeded need for me to want to fight it. I would have liked more a discussion about this idea, though.

While I initially thought I wouldn't be able to relate to the book much as I am not and have never studied to be a therapist, I see many of her tips being valuable to me as an educator. For example, she discusses the need to work with families and not against them (chapter 4) and the way she poses questions to her clients to enable them to find their own answers and challenge them to improve themselves in some way. There seems to also be helpful hints for, well, anyone such as maintaining balance in one's life (p. 37), the connection between affect, behavior, and cognition (p. 47), and how to challenge troublesome beliefs through challenging questions or reimaging.

Tia wrote: "On one hand, I love the frank honesty of this quote, but, on the other hand, it is also deeply pessimistic and makes me a little sad. Despite the fact that I can see the honesty in the statement, there's a deep-seeded need for me to want to fight it."

That quote really caught my attention, too. Your average American will live through about 28,000 days in his/her life and not all of those days are going to be happy. But I understand the need to make more of those days happy than not. The way I tend to go about fighting against that, particularly in therapy, is to use the unhappiness as a tool. What's making people unhappy? How can that be changed? How can it be avoided in the future? Does it necessarily need to be avoided now, or is the unhappiness carrying a deeper message that needs to be attended to?

Here's another bit that stood out to me in chapter 4: "...therapy is only a small part of our clients' lives. We have a responsibility not to screw up the other parts that work."

This really resonated for me, as I'm currently a therapist at an Ivy League university. Understandably, academics here are very high stakes. We have to be sure to attend to how much our clients can handle given the various demands in their lives and how to balance effective therapy with ensuring clients' continued functioning. Certainly some things are more important that academics, but we to have to consider whether certain topics would be best saved for therapy when students have matured, gained more life experience, or are simply at a place in their lives where they can devote more time and attention to their mental health.

I'm glad the discussion is still ongoing; I'm about halfway through. As an addiction psychiatrist, I see much value in her perspective...she's right that fads in therapy have come and gone over the 3 decades of experience she has. In particular, I love her attention to the richness of inner experience, and her appreciation of the importance of the past in framing our everyday experience.

Minor nitpicking: Her notion of listening for solutions rather than listening to problems can sometimes be detrimental, in my experience. From an analytic or dynamic perspective, the client will demand that a therapist experience their suffering as our own, and a purely solution-focused approach will interfere with exploration/resolution of the transference dynamic.

However, one thing I've noticed when most therapists describe their work is that what they say they are doing sometimes doesn't reflect what they are actually doing. There is some research on this that shows that observers of therapy are likely to rate it as matching their own theoretical framework, even though universal principles of good therapy tend to permeate all successful therapies... What I mean in Pipher's case is that she is probably quite extraordinary at listening to problems and appreciating the dynamics of the therapy, even if that is not how she overtly describes the focus of her practice.

But this is perhaps unfair since I'm only about halfway through so far. Overall I think its a great read, very nuanced and respectful of the complexity of human experience and suffering.

Omar wrote: "here is some research on this that shows that observers of therapy are likely to rate it as matching their own theoretical framework, even though universal principles of good therapy tend to permeate all successful therapies..."

I haven't seen that research, but that's a very interesting idea. Anecdotally it makes sense, as I tend to translate concepts from different orientations into my own when discussing cases with colleagues.

Esse wrote: "I haven't seen that research, but that's a very interesting idea. Anecdotally it makes sense, as I tend to translate concepts from different orientations into my own when discussing cases with colleagues. " Yes and I think you're not alone in that, which is a great approach. One of the most interesting studies on this topic is from Ablon & Jones Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology. 67(1):64-75, 1999 Feb. For those group members who are studying to be therapists its a must read.