Synopses & Reviews
What do these people have in common?
- The traveling businessman who brings prostitutes back to his hotel room
- The wealthy woman who is arrested for shoplifting
- The seemingly happily married man who cruises gay clubs
They are all despite differences in degree, gender, and age living a double life, one of our most deeply ingrained, but poorly understood psychological drives. Now, Dr. Gail Saltz steps into the breach to explore in detail and based on the latest research our impulse to create and nurture alter egos.
Saltz reveals how assuming a different identity can be healthy and tremendously liberating. For proof, we need look no further than the innumerable people who reinvent themselves by moving to the big city, or the countless pseudonymous bloggers. But, as she also makes clear, leading a secret life comes with potentially serious psychological risks. She shows that, in more extreme cases, leading a secret life can have devastating emotional, social and familial consequences both for the person leading the secret life, and for those close to him or her.
The definitive popular work on how a secret life is formed, lived, justified, and exposed, Saltz's Anatomy includes contemporary case studies and historical examples (Lindbergh, T. E. Lawrence, Tchaikovsky, et cetera) of people who have risked it all for a taste of forbidden fruit.
Review
"Dr. Saltz is a voice of wisdom and insight in a world of confusion and contradictions. We can all learn from her sagacity." Tom Brokaw
About the Author
GAIL SALTZ, M.D., a psychoanalyst and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Weill-Cornell School of Medicine, is a weekly contributor to the Today show. She is a frequent guest on Oprah and has written for Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Parade, and more. Dr. Saltz lives and works in New York City.