Description

From the bestselling author of Love's Executioner and When Nietzsche Wept comes a provocative exploration of the unusual relationships three therapists form with their patients.

Seymour is a therapist of the old school who blurs the boundary of sexual propriety with one of his clients. Marshal, who is haunted by his own obsessive-compulsive behaviors, is troubled by the role money plays in his dealings with his patients. Finally, there is Ernest Lash. Driven by his sincere desire to help and his faith in psychoanalysis, he invents a radically new approach to therapy -- a totally open and honest relationship with a patient that threatens to have devastating results.

Exposing the many lies that are told on and off the psychoanalyst's couch, Lying on the Couch gives readers a tantalizing, almost illicit, glimpse at what their therapists might really be thinking during their sessions. Fascinating, engrossing and relentlessly intelligent, it ultimately moves readers with a denouement of surprising humanity and redemptive faith.

About the Author

Irvin D. Yalom, M.D., is one of the world’s foremost psychiatrists, a visionary therapist and internationally bestselling author. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Love’s Executioner, Momma and the Meaning of Life, When Nietzsche Wept, the Schopenhauer Cure, and most recently A Matter of Death and Life, a dual memoir written with his late wife, Marilyn Yalom, PhD. His textbooks Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy and Existential Therapy are standards for therapists in training worldwide. In 2014 he was the subject of the documentary Yalom's Cure. Now in his nineties, Dr. Yalom continues to live and write in Northern California.

Benjamin Yalom is a San Diego-based psychotherapist, with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, who focuses on values, relationships, and existential concerns. He is a long-time writing collaborator with his father, Irvin D. Yalom. Prior to his doctoral studies in Marriage and Family Therapy, Ben was the visionary force behind foolsFURY theater, which helped transform San Francisco’s performing arts scene in the early 2000s. He is also an award-winning fiction writer. www.yalomtherapy.com

Praise For…

“If Freud or Jung had set out to write a psychological thriller, I doubt that either one could have come up with a yarn as taut and telling.” — Los Angeles Times

“Lying on the Couch is a witty, gripping and hugely entertaining novel from which the reader effortlessly learns a great deal about the theory and practice of psychotherapy.” — David Lodge, author of Therapy and The Art of Fiction

“A dazzling psychiatric whodunit ...Yalom brings to his latest work of fiction an authentic mastery of the techniques of psychotherapy and a real genius for showing the reader what is really going on inside the head of a psychiatrist while he or she is shrinking someone.” — Los Angeles Times

“[A] hilariously intricate tale ...This may be the funniest and most sensitive novel ever written about psychoanalysis.” — San Jose Mercury News

“[Yalom’s] insight into his own profession is sharp and merciless, recalling both Oliver Sacks and Studs Terkel. This is a novel for anyone who wants to know how the mind of a psychotherapist really works.” — San Francisco Chronicle