Tales from a Traveling Couch

by Robert U. Akeret

After thirty-five years in practice, prominent New York psychotherapist and author Robert Akeret found himself in the thrall of a single question: Did therapy make a real difference in his patients' lives? So on a sunny morning in April Dr. Akeret got into his van and set off to visit his most memorable former patients - a journey "in search of story endings." And what remarkable stories they are:. Naomi, an abused young Jewish girl from the Bronx who transforms herself into a Spanish flamenco dancer named Isabella. Was this a symptom of multiple personality disorder? Or was Naomi's "new self" a lifesaving personality adaptation? "Who" was she now, in her mid-fifties? What about Charles, the animal trainer who fell madly in love with a circus polar bear? Had he been able to resist his fatal psychosexual attraction? What became of Seth, a man obsessed with sadomasochistic fantasies yet drawn to the love-in culture of the sixties? Which side of him had won? What of Sasha, the dashing pri