Review by Booklist Review
As if enough literature on addicts and codependents hasn't already accumulated on library shelves, along comes another entry--with a difference, however. In Schaef's seventh psycho-tome (perhaps the most widely read was Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much), she argues passionately that psychotherapy must be replaced by a more humane healing model, one without diagnoses and cures. The first part of the book is a painful-to-read autobiography in which she embraces, with some modifications, the AA 12-step process as a rubic for her "Living in Process" method. The second part is a description (insofar as one is possible) of the roles of workshops and facilitators in her method. The third is her systematic disassembly of science and psychotherapy. A book destined to provoke thought . . . and sales. ~--Barbara Jacobs
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Schaef ( Women Who Do Too Much ) dismisses traditional approaches to psychotherapy as addictive processes that promote codependency and interfere with the people's need--and right--to heal themselves. She proposes a new mode of healing (called ``Living in Process'') that is characterized by action and spirituality and that parallels the ``current paradigm shift in our scientific worldview'' away from the linear, reductionistic and dualistic framework that she contends has marked Western culture for centuries. In a lengthy first section Schaef details her own history, emphasizing her developing opposition to the conventions of her training and her early practice as a psychotherapist. In subsequent sections she explains ``deep process work'' (in which people allow buried emotions to surface without attempting to control them) and puts her theories in a historical context. Sometimes convincing, occasionally garbled and self-absorbed, always intense, Schaef's account offers a powerful model of her central argument that authority for one's actions and beliefs must lie within oneself. $60,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
