The art of the obvious

by Bruno Bettelheim

The Art of the Obvious is both a compelling teaching tool and a riveting insider's view for laymen of how psychotherapists learn their craft. The book grew out of a weekly seminar for beginning psychotherapists that was started in 1977 by Bruno Bettelheim, the renowned psychologist, and Alvin Rosenfeld, then director of child psychiatry training at Stanford University. Over the next six years, established practitioners also were drawn to the seminars to discuss difficult. cases. From the raw materials of more than one hundred seminar transcripts, extensively reworked and refined, the authors fashioned five representative sessions in which they and the other participants address a variety of issues that therapists typically face - among them building a patient's trust during the first encounter; finding empathy for a violent, destructive child; avoiding preconceptions that might interfere with treatment; and assessing how psychotherapy can. alleviate depression in an elderly person. Thr