Description
Book SynopsisCompulsive buying is a serious, often secretive affliction, with profound emotional, social, occupational, and financial consequences. This book provides information about this disorder.
Trade ReviewDr. Benson and her colleagues have given us the first serious, scholarly, comprehensive (and fascinating) study of compulsive buying, its root causes, accompanying disorders, and treatment approaches. -- Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
Shopping, often ridiculed, pathologized as an obsession and a perversion, and associated with frivolous women, has now been given serious, balanced, and substantive treatment. Using current contributions from infant research, motivational systems theory, self psychology, and relational psychoanalytic perspectives, Dr. Benson and her contributors add to the literature on shopping by indicating its self-sustaining and self-enhancing aspects. Richly illustrating all aspects of the shopping experience, this book addresses the multitude of psychological issues that shopping can encompass and attempt to negotiate. -- Frank M. Lachmann and Beatrice Beebe
April Benson's I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying & the Search for Self is a comprehensive and timely examination of an understudied but emerging public health problem. Our understanding of compulsive shopping, along with the other impulse control disorders, is rapidly changing, and this book will surely facilitate a reexamination and reconceptualization. Including material on shopping as a drug; gender and self image issues; psychiatric assessment; psychopharmacology; and psychodynamic, couples, and self-help approaches, this book is a tour de force... -- Eric Hollander
This is a substantive, impressive, and important book that should be read by every clinician in practice. It is the first work ever to attempt—and largely succeed at—a serious, comprehensive examination of the nature of compulsive or addictive shopping, spending, and buying, problems now astonishingly widespread, usually denied, and nearly always concealed. It is a work that is both flawed and inspired, at once infuriating, stimulating, annoying, and exhilarating. It is somewhat wrong at times; at other times, dead right. Fortunately, it is more often the latter. In the end, this work is a significant and valuable contribution to healing in the new century. -- Jerrold Mundis
Intellectually and clinically substantial, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying & the Search for Self is so timely it ought to be on bookshelves everywhere, from the consulting room to the training institute. Given the remarkable explosion of e-commerce, Benson's focus on this subject seems almost prescient. It is impossible to imagine any therapist who doesn't come across the problem of compulsive buying, and equally impossible to imagine most clinicians having any idea about how to handle it.Dr. Benson has courage to take on this much disparaged, yet central aspect of everyday life... -- Ron Taffel
Intellectually and clinically substantial, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying & the Search for Self is so timely it ought to be on bookshelves everywhere, from the consulting room to the training institute. Given the remarkable explosion of e-commerce, Benson's focus on this subject seems almost prescient. It is impossible to imagine any therapist who doesn't come across the problem of compulsive buying, and equally impossible to imagine most clinicians having any idea about how to handle it. Dr. Benson has courage to take on this much disparaged, yet central aspect of everyday life. -- Ron Taffel
April Benson's I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying & the Search for Self is a comprehensive and timely examination of an understudied but emerging public health problem. Our understanding of compulsive shopping, along with the other impulse control disorders, is rapidly changing, and this book will surely facilitate a reexamination and reconceptualization. Including material on shopping as a drug; gender and self image issues; psychiatric assessment; psychopharmacology; and psychodynamic, couples, and self-help approaches, this book is a tour de force. -- Eric Hollander
Table of ContentsPart 1 Part I: An Overview Chapter 2 When Money Is the Drug Chapter 3 A Systematic Investigation into Compulsive Buying Part 4 Shopping, Buying, and Selfhood Chapter 5 Shopaholics, Spendaholics, and the Question of Gender Chapter 6 Are We What We Own? Chapter 7 The Role of Self-Image in Excessive Buying Chapter 8 Clothes, Inside Out Part 9 Part III: Special Issues in Compulsive Buying Chapter 10 Collecting as Reparation Chapter 11 Giving until It Hurts Part 12 Part IV: Psychiatric Considerations Chapter 13 Assessment of Compulsive Buying Chapter 14 Diagnosis, Associated Disorders, and Drug Treatment Part 15 Part V: Psychodynamic Theory and Technique Chapter 16 Compulsive Buying as an Addiction Chapter 17 When Eating and Shopping Are Companion Disorders Chapter 18 The Use of Money as an Action Symptom Chapter 19 Clothes and the Couch Part 20 Part VI: Couples Treatment and Group Therapy Chapter 21 Overcoming Overspending in Couples Chapter 22 Group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Buying Disorder Chapter 23 Psychoeducational Group Therapy for Money Disorders Part 24 Part VII: Treatment Adjuncts Chapter 25 Debtors Anonymous and Psychotherapy Chapter 26 Financial Recovery Counseling Chapter 27 Simplicity Circles and the Compulsive Shopper
