The Art of the Obvious: Developing Insight for Psychotherapy and Everyday Life

The Art of the Obvious is both a compelling teaching tool and a riveting insider's view for laymen of how psychotherapists learn their craft. The book grew out of a weekly seminar for beginning psychotherapists that was started in 1977 by Bruno Bettelheim, the renowned psychologist, and Alvin Rosenfeld, then director of child psychiatry training at Stanford University. Over the next six years, established practitioners also were drawn to the seminars to discuss difficult cases. From the raw materials of more than one hundred seminar transcripts, extensively reworked and refined, the authors fashioned five representative sessions in which they and the other participants address a variety of issues that therapists typically face - among them building a patient's trust during the first encounter; finding empathy for a violent, destructive child; avoiding preconceptions that might interfere with treatment; and assessing how psychotherapy can alleviate depression in an elderly person.
Through the illuminating discussions of each case history and its particular perplexities, the authors also contend with broader issues. As Bettelheim's final book, The Art of the Obvious gives us many of his last reflections on such subjects as his lifelong argument with the behavioral approach, his sense that research and therapy sometimes have competing agendas, and his realistic consideration of the limits of psychotherapy even in the best hands.
This book offers a moving last glimpse of a wise and humanistic teacher and an accessible, illuminating, and insightful exploration of psychotherapy, that alchemy of intuition and technique that Bruno Bettelheim called "the art of the obvious."

Rosenfeld here reconstructs a series of training seminars he and renowned child psychiatrist Bettelheim ( The Uses of Enchantment ) held with psychotherapists in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Stanford University Medical School. As director of training in child psychiatry there, Rosenfeld enlisted the help of the retired Bettelheim to enhance the students' understanding of psychoanalytically oriented therapy. Starting from single cases presented by students (all of whom were practicing therapists), the five free-ranging and substantial chapters explore such issues as the first interview, transference and counter-transference. Particularly moving are Bettelheim's observations on one young psychiatrist's work with an anxious elderly physician. Bettelheim, who died in 1990, demonstrates unwavering, compassionate attention to the individual under discussion, consistently rejecting quick, generalizing diagnoses and urging his listeners to seek out each patient's uniqueness. Rosenfeld is now director of psychiatric services at the Jewish Child Care Association in New York City. BOMC and QPB alternates.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For six years, the late, world-renowned child psychologist Bettelheim and practicing psychiatrist Rosenfeld co-conducted Socratic method seminars for psychotherapists at Stanford University. They then extracted representative case studies from these sessions, with the goal of providing a teaching tool for psychotherapists and giving insight into the process to non-professionals. Although this seems a formidable task, Bettelheim and Rosenfeld do an admirable job of elucidating some difficult and elusive concepts. As with psychotherapy itself, however, the knowledge this book offers results from the willingness and patience it takes to examine objectively all its aspects. At times, such detailed analysis can be tedious, but the rewards here are worth the effort. Recommended for all libraries serving professionals and motivated lay readers. BOMC and Quality Paperback Book Club alternates.
- January Adams, Somerville
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.