The Therapist's Emotional Survival

This book explores the private thoughts of the therapist in response to the patient's inner expressions and how each affects the other over the course of treatment. Perlman documents his own journey of having treated trauma. and sexually abused patients over many years. He details the issues the therapist needs to deal with, the emotional. strain, how the therapist's own traumas and history shape his behavior and intrude into the therapeutic process, and how he and others he has supervised, have come to manage this difficult process and maintain emotional health. Perlman illustrates this with powerful revealing of his thoughts, dreams, memories, history, personal psychotherapy, and emotional reactions. From this the author has developed a model of treatment that maximizes the patient's growth, and helps therapists understand treatment and develop more fully as people as well. This human and caring approach allows patients and therapists to open up to deeper experience within themselves and promotes healing in both.

Stuart D. Perlman, Ph.D., is in private practice in West Los Angeles, and a training analyst and member of the Board of Directors at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Dr. Perlman received Ph.D.s from UCLA in Clinical Psychology, and in Psychoanalysis at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, and was faculty at both. Dr. Perlman is widely published on the topics of trauma and sexual abuse, domestic violence, countertransference, and managing stress.