“I found myself reading the topic sentences of paragraphs, then going back to reread, and finding that I missed very little at all. This is especially true because she offers little to no empirical evidence for her ideas.”

One of the challenges, it seems, of writing self-help/therapy/psychological non-fiction is to communicate clearly and concisely. It is the “business” of non-fiction publishing which allows any brief idea, however valuable, and expand it to book length in order to achieve status, profits, etc. I could not help but think that Greenspan’s work fit into this mold while I read it. I found myself reading the topic sentences of paragraphs, then going back to reread, and finding that I missed very little at all. This is especially true because she offers little to no empirical evidence for her ideas (just anecdotes from her practice, which is extensive) at all.

All of that said, Greenspan’s point–that we must engage and process and accommodate our darker emotions–is hugely valuable (my own intuition about it, a response supported by Greenspan’s own emotional engagement over clinical one). The “exercises” for home practice are clear and helpful for those who try them, and they serve a practitioner level response to otherwise very complex and nuanced experiences. Personally, I found the final 2-3 chapters the most valuable as Greenspan (who wrote this work largely prior to Sept 11) writes about our global community responses to events that seem to be spinning out of control. How, collectively, do we address the tragedies of the world, the suffering that seems pervasive and omnipresent? While other writers have discussed this quandary, housed inside Greenspan’s practitioner stance, her responses struck me as the most genuine and significant.