Lying on the Couch: A Novel

This "novel" by Dr. Yalom is a true masterpiece. After having read his other popular books, I hesitated reading a "novel" , but what an amazing surprise... This work is really integrated, has great unity as far as structure goes and the subject area in which Dr.Yalom truly excells is really informative for therapists, analysts as well as patients. It gives insight not into just multiple relationships among doctors and patients but also among therapists themselves - patients in their relationships with their relatives and friends. It is an excellent guide to insight, analysis and problem-solving techniques as well as ethics, honesty and humanity. It should be required reading for courses and seminars that train analysts, therapists as well as counsellors and ultimately patients and friends and relatives of patients in therapy. Read this book -- honestly!

I don't read a lot of fiction these days, mostly because I tend to lose interest with implausible characters and/or events, such as sixteen year-olds that have the wisdom of Yoda or plot twists that require highly unlikely and convenient coincidences that just happen to involve the main characters. Of course very precocious teenagers exist and unlikely coincidences do happen, but when they show up in a novel, it usually feels forced to me and takes me out of the fictional dream. This dilemma is one reason I'm such an enormous fan of Yalom's Love's Executioner. It is nonfiction and thoroughly plausible, but is as absorbing as fiction (I recently listened to an audio version of the book that included an interview with Irvin Yalom and thoroughly enjoyed it: [[ASIN:1626549834 Love's Executioner: & Other Tales of Psychotherapy]] )

This tends to create something of a dilemma for me as a reader of fiction; it means the plot needs to be tight and realistic or the characters so sensitively portrayed (I'm thinking of Olive Kitteridge for example or Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri) that you don't need much plot.

Given how much I liked Love's Executioner, I decided to try Lying on the Couch. Happily, Lying on the Couch passed my "realism" test. It's not that the characters are sensitively portrayed ala Ms. Lahiri's (in fact, some of the characters felt a bit too too; that is, they seem too angry and vengeful or too self-blind or too weak-kneed or full of themselves), but they are realistic enough and the plot plausible and engaging enough that it definitely held my interest. In fact, more than held my interest; I didn't want to put the book down and plowed through it while on vacation creating the perfect beach reading: a good read that is also thought provoking. I haven't read a novel like that in a while.

As other reviewers have pointed out, I agree that those who are interested in psychotherapy, either as a therapist or client, will be most happy with this book. Lying on the Couch explores issues of transference, countertransference, intimacy, and how much a therapist should reveal to their patients from a variety of angles and circumstances. While these are very much therapist/client issues, they also apply to any relationship/s where there is a notable difference in power. In other word, there is wisdom to be gained for bosses, teachers, and parents.

Overall, I am a fan of Yalom's work--and while I didn't like this book as much as his masterpiece Love's Executioner, I'd certainly recommend it to anyone with the above interests looking for a lively and fun read. I have a good friend who is a psychotherapist and she really liked it as well.

I really enjoyed the dynamics of this book and appreciated the easy writting style! It was a great change of pace from the literature and classics that I usually read with out being overly soap-operish. I thought that the book intuitvley explored relationships at many dimensions and in many situations. It was an interesting point that the best of the best can so easily decieved. I have often wondered if a therapist would know if a patient was lying or not. I thought the book was well written and easy to get into. I don't think there was anyone that could not relate to one of the many characters at some level. I liked how, in every person, the good and bad sides of that character were revealed. The book was pretty rivoting and susspenceful, though I thought that one of the characters we had grown to know and love would somehow come out to be the villan- and that was a little dissapointing- but overall- I really enjoyed this book. It was great to bring the revered 'doctors' down to our level to realize that they really aren't too much different from the people that come to them for help!

I'm not particularly interested in psychotherapy, so I wasn't thrilled when my book club picked this to read. I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it immensely.
Therapist Ernest Lash decides to try an experiment: having a completely open and honest relationship with a new patient. Little does he know what effect this will have on him, his patient, and the people who know them. The chain-reaction that follows is amazing and entertaining. This book is great testimony to the power of honesty and integrity.

This book is awesome. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to be in therapy, here is your answer. This book gives you the inside information about the problems that faces both the therapeut and the pasient. Besides that it is written in a manner that intertwines the characters involved. We hear about his patients, and the next you know he is the husband of another of his patients, or the wife of the therapists advisor. The complications that this causes makes it into a humoristic book unlike anything I have ever read.
And the title alone, lying on the couch, is exceptional. It is the first clue into this naive therapist that truly believes that no one could lie to him. He is a good therapist, but he can't see this. So the conclusion is that the therapist, who thinks he can see what's going on, isn't much closer to the truth than the rest of his patients. And that's what makes this book so amusing.
This is a must read for anyone that has been in therapy, or are thinking about going there. And for everyone else that wants to know what it is like. If you're in for a laugh, run to the store and add this book to your collection. I promise you it will be worth it!

This book will appeal to psychotherapists, but I'm not at all certain that the general reader will find it terribly satisfying. Paradoxically for a novel about the psyche, the treatment of the fundamental ideas is disappointingly mechanical. It not unexpectedly reads like a fictionalised account of several therapies and supervisions, and on this level it is fine and may provide for practitioners an oblique way of looking at certain issues, but a narrative is not a novel. Yalom has a basically good plot but there are problems with pacing, and too often I found myself skipping whole paragraphs in order to move on with the story. There are too many places where events languish in the doldrums and lose impetus, and too many where overdescription causes the tale to flag - the card game at Avocado Joe's, for example: tension should be rising here but it becomes becalmed in a treatise on card play. Much of the book is dialogue, and much of that didactic tracts of psychotherapeutic monologue linked unconvincingly with, "Go on," or "Okay, I'm listening." That said, the conversational dialogue is well-written though it falls short of being "hilarious". Concision is conspicuous by its absence and the book would have gained in tautness if it had been half the length. I'd recommend it to friends in the field but suggest that the general reader pass it by. A whole ream of tedious psychological description can be replaced by a single poetic insight, and that is what is lacking here.

I'm a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst too, and probably a contemporary of Yalom's, and I declare the hero could have been me, a psychoanalytic maverick. Therefore I can say that without a doubt, if you have ever been a psychotherapist or a patient, the story will resonate. There are many fascinating sub-plots, and an element of suspense, and a magnificent, ironic ending, but the central theme is the contrast between an older, traditional Freudian, who is 'supervisor' and a younger, maverick eclectic, born-therapist, whose character grows and evolves as he performs a therapeutic miracle on a very unlikely patient.

I was very hopeful when I picked up this book. I am a psychoanalyst and love a good mystery. So I was very disappointed by the shallow one dimensional characters who seemed like stereotypes rather than real people. I was particularly disturbed by the characterizations of the psychoanalysts. Dr. Yalom is not a trained psychoanalyst but clearly has some very negative thoughts and feelings about the profession. I think this novel is hurtful to readers who may be in need of help in that it exploits fears about being able to trust psychoanalysis. And from the standpoint of pleasure....it was not a pleasure to read. It is not well written....very wordy and disorganized.

Okay, I had to order this book for school (I'm studying to be a LPC - Licensed Professional Counselor). I was excited to have to buy a non-fiction book instead of a fiction book for school, especially when I saw the cover of the book and the reviews. If anything, even if the book is terrible, it looks great on my nightstand (see picture) :-). My schooling starts end of August and I have already read about 100 pages of this book, I have not finished it obliviously but I feel I can give enough of a review/perspective to hopefully help others.
Pros:
The writing is crisp, engaging in third person and have different "voices" because the story deals with different characters.
The author, Irvin D. Yalom, does a good job of creating very different types of characters and he knows A LOT about psychotherapy because he is one, the author is currently in his 80's and according to Wiki page, still cuts a strong figure in his pictures and I can imagine he is (or was?) a bit of a Don Juan if you will with the ladies. I base that presumption on the fact that the first character in the book is an elderly man who is a psychotherapist that gets involved with a very promiscuous/off kilter patient. I imagined the author relating to this since he wrote the book n 1996 and as of 2016, he's 85, so 20 years ago, mid 60's he could foresee a man in his 70's still being able to catch a young and sexually active woman.
But that's not what this book is about really, so far, the book seems to be about how as patients, as clients, as therapist etc. we all experience things in our own way. What makes Irvin (the author) so good is that he is able to not just create multi-dimensional characters but SO many of them! It's as if the author himself has tons of different personalities in him (he is a Gemini ...ha, so who knows). So far this is why I DO like the book.
Now
Cons:
Where I struggle with the book is Irvin sometimes, especially in the first chapter, writes too much and makes you want to get to the point. Also, as interesting and varied some of his characters are? Some of a bit stereotypical.

I have no idea where the book will end but it's much like a series of short stories strung together yet with most, if not all, the characters somehow being connected to each other.

I look forward to the end of this book, not because it's so bad, but rather because much like ourselves, as human beings, it is multi-layered and unpredictable.

As an aspiring novelist (with three novels waiting in the wings for publication) I always read contemporary works mindful of what elements are evident that may have factored into getting them published. With Yalome's opus, Lying on the Couch, one element is its slick style. The sentence structures are efficient, and the progression within each chapter impeccable, with a feel of rightness and authorial confidence.

Aside from these positive aspects of the author's style, I have to as well admire his skill in weaving the characters and plots with an almost Dostyevskian genius.

Yet, a few things trouble me, and they all relate to the positive criticisms above. Though Yalome writes with great efficiency within sentence structures and individual chapters, the progression among the chapters (especially involving the Carolyn/Ernest and Marshall/Macando plots) drudge along at a dreary pace, despite the whole book being a mere 370 pps.--a novella by Dostoyevski's measure. Many times, while reading these plots, my mind broiled into an insane froth: "Get to the bloody point, man!" This makes the rather forced and unlikely ending that much more unsatisfying. (I mean, really, why would an avaricious psychiatrist who just DAYS BEFORE had his ego thoroughly bruised by a swindler agree to send money to someone he hasn't even met? And why would this same arrogant psychoanalyst then suddenly condescend to seeking psychotherapy from a lawyer, especially after the innumerable passages that established him as a rather shallow, extremely predictable, by-the-book, orthodox Freudian? These questions never get satisfactorially answered.)

I recognize how Yalome probes into some deep issues involving truth and compassion (as it pertains to the questionable "science" of psychoanalysis), but there's never an attempt at the universal; instead we have a cop-out ending, and a mundane one at that. In the end, while I respect many elements of his writing style (eg - his daring in using the word "pusillanimous"), and envy the fact that he has been published, I can't help the feeling that I have used the finest, polished silverware to consume a Snicker bar.