Synopses & Reviews
A wonderful book!! I am fascinated to read the conventional and unconventional methods of successful therapists who use their intuition, creativity and humanity rather than just their training to facilitate healing in challenging clients. All therapists, beginning and experienced will be inspired and informed by this book. Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.
Author of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
What an incredibly varied compilation of amazing therapists who, through sharing of their insights, strategies, intuitions and theories, offer both rookie and experienced therapists alike, golden nuggets that inspire and instruct! The richness of the stories of clients' lives are woven into tapestries that read like a novel. I love this book!
Michele Weiner-Davis, M.S.W.
Author of The Sex-Starved Marriage
From behind closed doors, leading therapists share their single-most challenging and ultimately triumphant cases, and recount how these experiences affected their view of therapy and their roles as helpers and healers.
In Their Finest Hour: Master Therapists Share Their Greatest Success Stories, two dozen of the field's best and brightest, on the cutting edge of their profession, relate their most professionally rewarding cases and what they learned from them. Readers will be fascinated as therapists talk about what defines achievement in their field, and how therapy really works. They speak frankly about how their seminal cases shaped their ideas. Told in a narrative style, each story ends with a unique lesson to be learned. The book is practical and accessible for practitioners in the field and those simply interested in the dynamic approaches taken by today's leading therapists.
Jeffrey Kottler is Professor and Chair of the Counseling Department at California State University, Fullerton, and has written more than 50 books in psychology, counseling, and related fields. He has authored a dozen texts for counselors and therapists and another dozen on the nature of change. His book, The Last Victim: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, is a New York Times best seller.
Jon Carlson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Governors State University, University Park, and a psychologist at the Wellness Clinic in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He has authored more than 30 books and 120 articles, and produced more than 100 videos featuring the world's best therapists in action. He currently edits the award-winning The Family Journal.
About the Author
Jeffery Kottler is Professor and Chair of the Counseling Department at California State University, Fullerton, and has written more than fifty books in psychology, counseling, and related fields. He has authored a dozen texts for counselors and therapists and another dozen on the nature of change. His book
The Last Victim: Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, is a New York Times best seller.
Jon Carlson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Counseling at Governors State University, University Park, and a psychologist at the Wellness Clinic in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He has authored more than thirty books and 120 articles, as well as produced more than 100 videos featuring the world's best therapists in action. He currently edits the award-winning The Family Journal.
Table of Contents
1. The Finest Hours.
2. Jeffrey Kottler: The Ball, the Snowflakes, and the Wheelchair.
3. Jon Carlson: My Mama's Dead and My Daddy's in Jail.
4. Michael Yapko: Limits of the Past.
5. Susan Johnson: Slaying a Dragon.
6. William Glasser: The Control Freak with the Gun Collection.
7. Pat Love: An Immovable Object.
8. Nick Cummings: Extreme Therapy.
9. Michael Mahoney: Put Caring at the Top of the List.
10. Albert Ellis: I Accept Myself, and Others: Therefore I am.
11. Laura Brown: Recovering from Therapy Abuse.
12. Arnold Lazarus: Brought Back From the Dead.
13. Bradford Keeney: The Queen of Shock.
14. Peggy Papp: A Family Epiphany.
15. Frank Pittman: We Have to Seduce People into Trusting Us Before We Spank Them.
16. Stephen Lankton: Both Sides of the Story.
17. Alvin Mahrer: The Gardener Who Dug Very Deep.
18. Richard Stuart: Solving Insolvable Problems.
19. John Krumboltz: Treating the Trauma of Alien Abduction.
20. William Doherty: Killing Herself Slowly.
21. Gordon Wheeler: Thinking Out Loud.
22. John Gray: Finding Love in the Right Direction.
23. Judy Jordan: When the Therapist and Client Influence One Another.
24. Robert Neimeyer: Continuing a Relationship with a Dead Father.
25. David Scharff: A Demolition Project.
26. Terrence Real: To Dare to Tell the Truth.
27. Stephen Madigan: Letters of Faith.
28. Scott Miller: You Can't Kill Yourself Until You Pay Your Debt.
29. Learning From Their Finest Hours: A Narrative Analysis of Core Themes (with Myf Maple).