Books in Brief: The Shrinking of America

The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change, by Bernie Zil-bergeld (‘Little, Brown, 307 pp., $17)

Bernie Zilbergeld has a message: “What psychotherapy at its best can do is well captured by an old French maxim: ‘To cure sometimes, to help often, to comfort and console always.’ Therapy in our time can do no more —we will be lucky if it can do this much—and in the long run neither clients nor therapists benefit by pretending otherwise.” In the course of proving his point, Zilbergeld steps on a lot of toes and shatters a lot of cherished illusions; he’s up on all the latest therapeutic outcome studies, and he isn’t afraid to lay his conclusions on the line. And there’s a twist: Zilbergeld is a practicing psychotherapist. One doubts that his colleagues will be too happy with this unusually hardheaded book; but anyone else interested in psychotherapy, for whatever reason, would do well to read The Shrinking of America closely and thoughtfully. It’s not really an exposé—just an honest presentation of the facts about a very expensive procedure that isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.