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Download Author: Vaughan, Susan C., M.D.

Susan C. Vaughan, M.D. is a NIMH research fellow studying long-term psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and a senior candidate at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in New York City. Her writing has been published in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, The American Journal of Psychiatry, and The New Yorker. Dr. Vaughan practice psychiatry in New York City.

2 eBooks available.

Half Empty Half Full: understanding the psychological roots of optimism

In her groundbreaking book, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and researcher Susan C. Vaughan, M.D., offers fresh and helpful ways to understand optimism. Reality, she shows, is overrated; instead, it is healthy illusions that form the bases of optimism. Optimism flows from our ability to interpret and remember our experiences in a positive light. If we can do this on a regular basis and if we can trust ourselves to moderate own own moods, then all the good things that flow from an optimistic view of life can be ours. Examining the origins of optimism in early life and offering new evidence for the role of biology in how we interpret our experience, Vaughan offers some unusual but proven tricks and techniques to fool the brain’s circuitry into looking on the bright side.

Dr. Vaughan shows that in learning the skills we need to construct and sustain illusions, we also build a stable, internal psychological core of strength, an authentic inner island of hope and self-control that makes a good life possible.

Optimism is a process, not a state; and it is within the grasp of everyone. This is the fundamental good news of this marvelous book which shows how to achieve greater mastery over our inner world and thus have greater optimism about the world around us.

The Talking Cure: the science behind psychotherapy

If you’ve ever been in therapy, you may have wondered how just talking about your problems can affect how you think and feel for the rest of your life. You may also wonder what is going on in your therapist’s mind. This brilliant book illustrates how the process of therapy—the long, sometimes tedious concentrated attention to core conflicts—actually alters the shape of our neurons, modifies the connections between nerve cells in the brain, and effects permanent changes in how we interact with the world.  Dr. Susan Vaughan, a superb writer, takes you behind the scenes of the fifty-minute hour, and tells you what the therapist is thinking while the patient is talking.

A psychoanalyst and a scientist, Vaughan interweaves stories from her sessions with findings from research. She shows how free-associating, interpreting dreams, and paying attention to childhood experiences have an impact on the structure of our anatomy. Just as repeated exercise can change the shape of our bodies, so can repeated attention to our conflicts, in the course of our work with a therapist, alter the shape of our minds. This book is a boon for patients who wonder why therapy works, and for therapists who know that it works but don’t know what it does to the brain.

Now, armed with a scientific basis for its effectiveness, therapy can emerge from the shadow of Prozac. The Talking Cure is a powerful amalgam of the skill of the therapist and the science of the brain, wonderful to read and exhilarating to understand.

Reviews:

“This book has made a wonderfully readable beginning in what has seemed for so long an impossible task: to relate what goes on in the minds of analyst and patient to our rapidly evolving understanding of what goes on in our brains.”

Myron A. Hofer, M.D.
Director-Developmental Psychobiology-New York State Psychiatric Institute

“A fascinating, original book. Explaining how modern neuroscience can help us understand the work of psychotherapy. Dr. Vaughan takes a significant step toward completing the task that Sigmund Freud began—offering a scientific basis for the workings of the mind.”

Stanley Bone, M.D.
Training Analyst, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

“The Talking Cure makes a strong, even witty case for viability of its author’s discipline….We need not be total victims of how we happen to have been programmed. As she reasons, convincingly, if a sea slug can have its mind changed, then so can we.”

The New York Times

“Ambitious but highly readable.”

The Washington Post Book World

“Vaughan helps us to understand how intensive therapy of any kind works.”

Family Therapy Networker

“Susan Vaughan’s brief for the talking cure is a bravely speculative book, one that links psychotherapy, that intimate technology for the mind, to neurophysiology, our cutting-edge window on the brain.”

Peter D. Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac

“Caring and sensitive, Vaughan uses several case histories to demonstrate her methods…Thought provoking and informative.”

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  • Recent Comments

    • gabriel on The Secrets of Satir: “it was very helpful, now i can feel like i am more close to experiential therapy. virginia is a genius”
    • Kat Steeneken on Seeing Red: “Fantastic resource, I’m so grateful for these e books”
    • Ashmita shahi on Depressive Disorders: Facts, Theories, and Treatment: “As I am student of BSW working on the child development and research .In the development of the child a…”
    • Dieu Van, Doan on Useful Servants: Psychodynamic Approaches to Clinical Practice: “It is very useful for me to learn and teach in the deep fields of psychology. Thank you very much…”
    • Valerie Golden on Seeing Red: “Amazing resource! Thank you!”
    • Lynne Frederick on Seeing Red: “It helps me learn more about anxiety and how people think which helps me working with other people”
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