An exciting carousel centered on psychotherapy is the second novel by the famous American psychiatrist and psychotherapist Irvin Yalom. The author reveals to the public what happens inside the office and in the minds of psychotherapists, their lives, their difficulties, their human nature. Humor and subtle irony dominate and alternate with biting descriptions of representatives of the psychiatric world. However, as psychotherapists are demystified, the allure of psychotherapy increases. Yalom presents it in a new light: it is a companionable journey towards achieving genuine human contact. With a cinematic approach, continuous twists, and detective suspense, Yalom analyzes modern society and human relationships in Lying on the Couch.
Lying on the Couch is the free translation of the English title Lying on the Couch.
Yalom makes an untranslatable pun here with three different meanings: it first denotes the reclining of the analyzed person on the psychoanalytic couch, as a symbol of psychotherapy. It implies the sexual act between patient and therapist, one of the central ethical issues posed and interpreted in the book, and finally refers to the concealment and distortion of truth, the lie that can infiltrate the psychotherapeutic process. The author methodically tackles all three issues, integrating them organically into a fascinating fiction.
In his first novel, When Nietzsche Wept, Yalom dealt with psychotherapy in its embryonic form, as it was being shaped within the body of philosophy in late 19th-century Vienna. In Lying on the Couch, he observes the profession of the psychotherapist a hundred years later, within the nursery of American society, where, after many experiments, the various types of 20th-century psychotherapy developed.
Lying on the Couch is also an excellent mosaic of American society: money, luxury, vanity, individualism, aggression, but also their other side: loneliness, futility, lack of affection, resorting to substance use, are described with precision but also with understanding.