Description
Book SynopsisPerversion is a lack of capacity for whole object love, and while this includes the sexual perversions it also includes certain character perversions, and psychotic conditions. This book shows how some of the paradoxes of self/other, subjectivity/objectivity, male/female and instinct/object are negotiated in both illness and health.
Trade ReviewThis book is simultaneously a 'good read,' in the sense of a novel that one cannot put down, and a feast to be savored slowly. It has a wealth of clinical detail that makes it vivid. I recommend it highly. -- Fred Pine
Sheldon Bach shows how the language of informed listening may be the only instrument that can make the bizarre not an outcast, but merely another existential member of a complex family called humanity. Dr. Bach's empathic listening is the essence of all language which is not merely interested in the sound of words but in what Robert Frost has called the sound of sense. Dr. Bach has cultivated this sound of sense knowing that it is the royal road to healing and that the language of healing is, after all, one of the great therapeutic aspects of love. This book reaches into the perverse and loving in all of us and makes the human condition a little more human, which is no small achievement. -- Eugene J. Mahon
In this clinically important work, Bach shows us a new way of listening and responding to difficult, perverse, and borderline patients. Sheldon Bach is a psychoanalyst with the unique ability to derive important truths from the study of severe mental illness and extreme examples of depravity. Bach invokes the insights of poets, novelists, and diarists. This breadth of culture enhances the depth of his humane understanding; the depth of his psychoanalytic experience enhances the breadth of his clinical wisdom. This is an engrossing work indeed. -- Arnold D. Richards and Arlene Kramer Richards
