Author Description

"Personal struggles with crises or with certain aspects of identity sometimes enhance, sometimes limit, but always affect our clinical work." So notes editor Barbara Gerson in introducing this collection of powerfully illuminating and often poignant essays in which contributors candidly discuss the impact of central life crises and identity concerns on their work as therapists. With chapters focusing on identity concerns associated with the body-self (body size, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age), urgent life crises, and defining life circumstances, The Therapist as a Person exemplifies the myriad ways in which the therapist's subjectivity shapes his or her interaction with patients. Included in the collection are life events rarely if ever dealt with in the literature: the death of family members, late pregnancy loss, divorce, the failure of the therapist's own therapy, infertility and childlessness, the decision to adopt a child, and the parenting of a profoundly deaf child.