cover image THE THIEF OF HAPPINESS: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy

THE THIEF OF HAPPINESS: The Story of an Extraordinary Psychotherapy

Bonnie Friedman, . . Beacon, $24 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-7242-4

Transference—that alchemy of the psychotherapy session, with all its drama and inscrutability—is the subject of Friedman's engrossing second book. Here, the author of Writing Past Dark (about the emotional aspects of the writing process) examines in minute detail her treatment with Dr. Harriet Sing (a pseudonym). Like the poet H.D. (Tribute to Freud), Friedman entered therapy for writer's block. After two weeks, she found herself writing her first book. As a result, she identified Sing as the source of her inspiration, and an intense infatuation resulted: "Little mattered now beside Harriet Sing. Everyone else was merely metaphoric." Friedman emerged confident in her identity as a writer only after seven years of intense self-scrutiny with Sing. By then, the therapist's role had evolved into something far more ambiguous, and it is here that readers may come to understand what really goes on between therapist and patient. Friedman refers to Sing as a "thief of happiness." Though at times self-indulgent (as when the author veers off into half-articulated, dreamy memories, the book is excellent in the way H.D.'s is: it illuminates the intricate, murky relationship between therapy and real life, the ways in which, as the author quotes Adam Phillips, "in one's relationship with the analyst one unwittingly relives and thus discovers one's emotional history." Friedman is at her best when relaying the delicately nuanced exchanges that occur between the patient and therapist. "I can't be in treatment and be happy," she tells Sing. "That's a very interesting assumption," Sing replies. Agent, Malaga Baldi. (Jan. 17)

Forecast:Fans of Friedman's first book will certainly like this one, and writers interested in the therapeutic process as a way to ease their block will enjoy it, too. With the right publicity campaign, the book could, like Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, develop a cult following.