Coming to Life: Reflections on the Art of Psychotherapy

With vignettes, metaphors, and a focus on the experience of the patient rather than labels or jargon, Havens depicts three kinds of language intended to facilitate contact with patients suffering from the three kinds of absence. Embedded in these approaches, however, is far more than how to techniques. The reader is introduced to an elegant, clinically useful, and subtle way of thinking about some of our most troubled and troubling patients. Havens clearly knows that without passion there is no truth. Indeed, he demonstrates how disciplined passion can aid us not only in reaching our patients, but also in reaching the dark parts of ourselves as well. --Fred Scectman, Ph.D., Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic

This highly original book, filled with illuminating clinical examples, is actually a primer of grammar and rhetoric for the psychotherapist...We are also given glimpses of the work of an artist-therapist who has crafted a personal style of great power and who consistently provides thedate on which his new ideas are based...This volume is clearly the result of a lifetime of experience. It systematizes and categorizes what a wise...therapist does to help his patient...The writing is admirably lucid and simple, and those of us with less experience--or less sheer therapeutic talent--may be beguiled into thinking we can quickly achieve the therapeutic dexterity of the master therapist that Havens is...Even the most experienced therapist, however, will learn new things, will rethink the ways he or she talks to patients, and will do better work after studying this book...This is a most important contribution that I highly recommend. --Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., American Journal of Psychiatry

The virtual elimination of inpatient psychotherapy in modern American psychiatry makes the appearance of Leston Havens' book most welcome. Havens, a nationally known Harvard clinician and teacher, has gathered a lifetime of psychotherapeutic wisdom into less than 200 pages of advice to those who treat ego-damaged patients--the psychotic, the seriously depressed, and the borderline. This well-written book can be of use to therapists of all levels of sophistication. --Walter Weintraub, M.D., Hospital and Community Psychiatry

Making Contact by Leston Havens, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is a basic grammar of empathy--a sort of Strunk and White for psychotherapists. While it may not be of much use to laymen, it might be of great interest to those who at one time or another have lain upon a couch...Obviously, the author of this quite lively and quite lovely text is interested and skilled in providing genuine verbal havens rather than with easyintellectualizations. --Susan Monsky, Boston Globe