A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm and Healing in Psychotherapy

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."--The Los Angeles Times.

A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy.

In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old--one that ultimately heals them both.

Author: Annie Rogers
Publisher: Penguin Life
Published: 08/01/1996
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.59lbs
Size: 7.70h x 5.12w x 0.73d
ISBN13: 9780140240122
ISBN10: 0140240128
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Social Scientists & Psychologists
- Psychology | Psychotherapy | Counseling
- Psychology | Mental Health

About the Author
Annie G. Rogers is the professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Hampshire College as well as being on the faculty of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco. She is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship in Ireland, a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, and a Whiting Fellowship at Hampshire College. She is the author of A Shining Affliction, The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma, as well as many other works, both fiction and nonfiction.