SPT-Fall2014

Jacqueline A. Carleton, PhD and the USABP Interns
The Myth of the Untroubled Therapist:
Private Life, Professional Practice
By Marie Adams. 2014
Reviewed by Phillipe Kleefield, New York
University
The Myth of The Untroubled Therapist:
Private Lives, Professional Practice,
written by Marie Adams, is a frank, warm,
and refreshing read for any clinician
working in the field of mental health.
Through the qualitative study of 40
clinicians throughout The United Kingdom
and Canada, Marie Adams seeks to engage
in “consciousness raising”, creating a space
in which clinicians can come to feel more
at ease in knowing that many professionals
in the field face personal issues that can
come to affect their work. Analyzing the
data from her various interviews, Adams
has found that most of the clinicians she
interviewed had personal motivations for
entering the field, arguing that these
motivations exist as both a boon and a
disadvantage, allowing for these therapists
to at times feel a greater sense of empathy
toward patients, while at other times
fostering sharp disavowals or negative
counter-transferences. Adams also explores
a list of different issues that arose in her
sample of clinicians since they’ve become
licensed such as depression, anxiety, death
in the family, burn-out, shame, and
narcissistic ideations of wanting to feel
successful with a patient. Adams seeks to
create a space for clinicians in which they
can feel safe to acknowledge their own
personal issues that may affect their work,
urging each and every clinician to allow
themselves to feel vulnerable, counter their
shame, feel less impervious to the demand
to feel perfect and unscathed, and to reach
out to other professionals in their
communities.
Her first and last chapters are what I find to
be the most central in understanding a
broad overview of the various themes that
she explores in the lives of her sample.
Although one of her shortest chapters, the
first chapter acknowledges the importance
of personal motivations in the lives of the
therapists she studied, arguing that these
therapists should feel compelled to be
aware, present with and critical of these
personal motivations as they engage with
their patients. Stressing the need to not feel
above patients, she instead wants clinicians
to deconstruct and reflect on their own
behaviors, reactions, and experiences in the
therapeutic process. Serving as a sort of
discussion and culmination of her study,
the last chapter explores each prior issue in
further depth and advocates not only for the
importance of supervision for clinicians but
that they develop an individualized strategy
to mitigate issues that could come up in
therapy with patients.
Adams’ book explores the needs and issues
clinicians face in working with patients
through a therapeutic process. It is at times
ironic to read how unwilling clinicians can
be to take care of their own health and
admit their own faults when they are tasked
with the arduously rigorous responsibility
of making other people better. Adams does
seem to make the assumption that no
therapist has successfully found a strategy
to maintain a strict boundary between their
personal and professional life, paying very
little attention to those therapists in her
sample that don’t feel particularly
influenced by the personal in their work
with patients, dismissing these clinicians as
not having a full understanding of their
motivations and behaviors. I think that a
source of further inquiry might involve
clinicians who have found a means of
separating themselves from their therapy
work. However, Adams might conclude
that this really isn’t possible. Overall,
Adams has written a well-reasoned and
compelling book arguing that therapists
should feel more empowered to consider
their own needs in addition to those of their
patients.
A Primer for ICD-10-CM Users:
Psychological and Behavioral Conditions
By Carol Goodheart. 2014
Reviewed by: Joshua D. Wright, Hunter
College of the City University of New
York
Carol D. Goodheart had two purposes for
writing A Primer for ICD-10 Users:
Psychological and Behavioral Conditions:
to inform mental health professionals of the
necessary information to use the World
Health Organization’s International
Classification of Diseases, and to “pave the
way for the successful adoption and use of
ICD-11” (p. 3). The guide strives to bridge
the gap between mental health diagnoses in
the United States and abroad, especially
given globalization and the need to adopt a
system that “can be adapted across a wide
range of cultures” (p.4).
This book begins with an overview of the
ICD system and points out that ICD codes
Somatic Psychotherapy Today | Fall 2014 | Volume 4 Number 2 | page 100