Reviews and Comments

I've been waiting for this book. I started listening to the audio book version and cried all the time. This is the kind of therapy I want to do.

I can't shake off the suspicion that the IFS people mistake what happens and works in therapy with what actually goes on in the psyche. It is one thing to deal with the subsystems of a complex, conscious being by addressing them as "parts" or "subpersonalities" and let them speak to each other. It is a whole other thing to assume that those "parts" actually exists within the psyche.

I have so many things to say about this book it could be a book itself. I'll see if I can write a review sometime at least.

The chapter on neurofeedback was definitely the low point of the book so far. It's presented as a miraculous cure that can be used for just about anything, including "treating autism"? Really?

He's a very sympathetic clinician but I'm increasingly annoyed by van der Kolk's insistence that we're all brains, not persons, and his conflation of mind, body and brain. Closet dualism at its finest.

Van der Kolk recapitulates the research history of neurotransmittors and the pharmacological revolution in psychiatry of which he himself was a part. It's an interesting insider's perspective. However, it bothers me that unethical animal experiments are just accepted with the comment "I wouldn't do that". I also notice the lack of sociocultural explanations, it's all hard biomedicine, despite van der Kolk's humanistic approach to psychiatry.

I'm not sure what to think. This book is as weird as it is spot on. As if Schwartz got it right but somehow all wrong at the same time. Intuitively correct, theoretically and particularly philosophically underworked.

So far, I love it.

I love van der Kolk's accessible language. This is an easy and personal read.

Long awaited read. Arrived yesterday.

I think I give up this book now. Nathanson has some interesting points and I do like the concept of the compass of shame, but his writing style is terrible.

Oh my. A chapter about culture, without any references to any sociologists or anthropologists or any references at all, in fact, where Kreisman comes out as a naïve conservative where everything was better before WWII, we had nuclear family, church, groups and now we have BLM and Metoo and fragmented lives and Facebook and Twitter and that has ruined everything. Embarrassingly shallow analysis. Maybe Kreisman should have stuck with his clinical experience.

I'm appalled that a book published in 2021 still relies so heavily on Margaret Mahler's obsolete psychoanalytic developmental theories from the 1970s (the object relations theory), as if Daniel Stern and others never existed.

Sixteen pages is all I can endure in one day.

I just started reading this book. It's almost unbearable to read it. I can only do it a few pages at the time. Because it's about me. Almost every line in this bloody book is about me. I recognise almost everything. Tears run down my cheeks with every fucking page. I hate it. I hate this book. That's why I have to read it.

And another book professor Marecek suggested, but it's sitting still on my bookshelf waiting to be read.