Psychotherapy Pearls

Psychotherapy Pearls began as a personal project to capture as many of the clinical insights as possible from the careers of its two authors, Fred Levin and Meyer Gunther. Such wisdom accumulates piecemeal only from the continued intensive experience of working each day with patients who are suffering from a vast array of difficulties: narcissistic deficits, depressions, anxiety and phobic disorders, learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar illness (so-called manic depressive disorder), Alzheimer's disease and other dementing illnesses, mourning and melancholia, and so forth. The only way to learn about specific people is to become immersed in their psyche: to care with and about them, over long periods of time, and only then can one learn to respect the dignity and power of individuals as they patiently find enduring solutions to their problems. To be part of this intensity is a great privilege, as well as a responsibility. Out of respect for those we have worked with, both colleagues and patients, and in order to make things a bit easier for those who wish to improve their knowledge of psychotherapy theory and technique, we have worked diligently to state our hard won insights clearly for students of all levels of experience and sophistication.One unique feature of Psychotherapy Pearls is that we cover both technique and psychopathology in one book. Most textbooks tackle one or the other, but we believe this is wasteful, since it makes most sense to us to consider technique in close proximity to our discussions of the very illnesses and problems for which our technique is designed to address. Moreover, in considering technique we center our thinkingabout common sense psychology which most readers have been thinking about, whether they realize it or not, from the beginning of their lives, but without ever pulling these bits of insight together into a body of knowledge or theory as such. For example, our book begins witLevin, Fred M. is the author of 'Psychotherapy Pearls', published 2001 under ISBN 9781413404715 and ISBN 1413404715.