Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From the bestselling author of Love's Executioner and When Nietzsche Wept comes a provocative exploration of the unusual relationships three therapists form with their patients.

Seymour is a therapist of the old school who blurs the boundary of sexual propriety with one of his clients. Marshal, who is haunted by his own obsessive-compulsive behaviors, is troubled by the role money plays in his dealings with his patients. Finally, there is Ernest Lash. Driven by his sincere desire to help and his faith in psychoanalysis, he invents a radically new approach to therapy -- a totally open and honest relationship with a patient that threatens to have devastating results.

Exposing the many lies that are told on and off the psychoanalyst's couch, Lying on the Couch gives readers a tantalizing, almost illicit, glimpse at what their therapists might really be thinking during their sessions. Fascinating, engrossing and relentlessly intelligent, it ultimately moves readers with a denouement of surprising humanity and redemptive faith.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

It's laudable when a person successful in one field tries a hand at another, but based on his sophomoric second novel (following When Nietzsche Wept, Basic, 1992), Yalom shouldn't give up his psychiatry practice to write fiction. Yalom limns the lives of a group of whining psychoanalysts as they variously cope with accusations of sexual misconduct, fall victim to con men, deal with issues of counter-transference, and come under suspicion by their colleagues for false interpretations of Freudian theory. Dr. Ernest Lash, the novel's hero, abandons his psychoanalytic training and develops a new type of therapy in which he attempts to establish an honest and authentic relationship with his patient, offering advice and support rather than limiting his discourse to interpretations of the patient's dreams and feelings. Therapy veterans and those readers who enjoyed Yalom's nonfiction (e.g., Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, LJ 8/89) may start this novel, but its disjointed style and cardboard characters will fast discourage them from finishing it. Not recommended.‘Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A willingness to confess to his various mistakes in the course of treating patients made Dr. Yalom's 1989 nonfiction bestseller, Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, endearing, but one hopes that this satire of the Bay Area psychiatric industry is not another mea culpa in disguise. The two psychiatrists at the center of Yalom's second novel (after When Nietzsche Wept) find themselves entangled in situations for which their clinical training could not have prepared them. Dr. Ernest Lash, who is, in fact, extremely earnest and given to wearing earth shoes and stained ties, decides to experiment with a new, more intimate therapeutic approach, unwittingly playing into the hands of Carol Leftman, a patient determined to ruin his professional reputation because he had encouraged her husband to leave her. Meanwhile, Ernest's former supervisor, the ambitious, self-important Dr. Marshal Streider, is fleeced by a charismatic con man masquerading as a patient. For help, Marshal turns to a lawyer‘the very same Carol Leftman who's dogging Ernest. For both Marshal and Ernest, then, the absolute honesty they demand during the therapeutic hour is at odds with the professional ethic of confidentiality that binds both lawyers and shrinks. Yalom is exploring the jungles of what Ernest calls "wildcat therapy," in which therapists are unable to maintain the Olympian mantle of clinical disinterest in encounters with their patients. Whether this is good medicine or not, Yalom doesn't quite say. As absorbing as it is, the novel presents the moral or professional blunders of the analysts as the acceptable price of doing business. $50,000 ad/promo; author tour; Rights: William Morris Agency. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

This novel features a lot of lying (in more than one sense) on or next to a couch, for most of it is set in a California where psychoanalysts, lawyers, and gamblers abound. When ambitious young analyst Ernest Lash counsels Justin Astrid to leave his wife, Carol, a hotshot attorney, she and two colleagues dream up getting back at both men by having Carol become one of Ernest's patients in order to sabotage him. Meanwhile, Marshal Streider, Ernest's supervising analyst, wishes to become San Francisco's leading analyst and to develop an international reputation, and his ruthless campaign to do so blots out all opposition. But Streider's arrogance blinds him to one of his own patients, who turns out to be a highly competent scam artist. Badly jolted by his misadventure, Streider becomes one of Carol's clients in order to regain his lost funds. Although the law doesn't help her own scheme, ultimately, Carol, with Ernest's indirect aid, becomes Streider's "analyst." No violence, little sex, and much conversation add up to a surprisingly attention-holding story. --William Beatty

Kirkus Book Review

The author of the nonfiction Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy (1989) and the novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992) now takes up the most vexing issue facing psychiatry: the boundaries of treatment. Yalom begins with the story of Seymour Trotter, an unconventional therapist who has had a long sexual involvement with a female patient 40 years his junior. His testimony troubles Ernest Lash, the San Francisco practitioner serving on the ethics panel that will ultimately drive Trotter from the field, because Trotter's techniques appear to have delivered the woman from her borderline world of promiscuity and self-mutilation. Some years later, one of Ernest's patients, a timid, obsessive man, leaves his wife for a younger woman. The jilted wife, Carol, a ruthless lawyer, blames Ernest and hatches a plot to ruin him by becoming his patient and seducing him. Ernest is single, lonely, and mightily tempted, but he is also conscientious and honest, and begins to see through Carol's nearly airtight story. Carol becomes a true patient and confronts the fears that have tortured her. And sex is not the only tricky boundary that Yalom explores. In a nice twist, Ernest's analytic supervisor, Marshal Streider, an upright, formal man who feels Ernest's commitment to complete honesty is naive, enters into an investment with a con man passing as a patient. The con man reads Marshal's vulnerabilities perfectly: excessive ambition and love of money. Marshal, raging, friendless, unable to consult with another practitioner, pours out his soul to a lawyer, Ernest's patient Carol. The student teaches the master as Carol, without violating her confidences, draws therapeutic strategies from Ernest and ``treats'' Marshal--or, rather, forces him to treat himself. A marvelous examination of how psychiatrists actually think, building to a vision of a community healthy and mature enough to confront its deepest and most persistent fears. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Irvin D. Yalom was born in Washington, D.C. on June 13, 1931, of parents who immigrated from Russia shortly after World War I. Yalom entered into medical school intent on studying the field of psychiatry. His first writings were scientific contributions to professional journals. His first book, "The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy" was widely used as a text for training therapists. It has been translated into twelve languages and spawned four editions.

"Existential Psychotherapy" followed, which was a textbook for a course that did not exist at the time, and then "Inpatient Group Psychotherapy," a guide to leading groups in the inpatient psychiatric ward. In an effort to teach aspects of Existential Therapy, Yalom turned to a literary conveyance and wrote a book of therapy tales called "Love's Executioner", two teaching novels, "When Nietzsche Wept" and "Lying on the Couch" and, "Momma and the Meaning of Life," a collection of true and fictionalized tales of therapy.

These books went on to be best sellers, and "When Nietzsche Wept" won the Commonwealth Gold Medal for best fiction of 1993. They have been widely translated,each into about fifteen to twenty languages, and have had considerable distribution abroad.

(Bowker Author Biography)