A Shining Affliction - by Annie Rogers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient."--The Los Angeles Times.

A moving account of a true-life double healing through psychotherapy.

In this brave, iconoclastic, and utterly unique book, psychotherapist Annie Rogers chronicles her remarkable bond with Ben, a severely disturbed five-ear-old. Orphaned, fostered, neglected, and forgotten in a household fire, Ben finally begins to respond to Annie in their intricate and revealing platy therapy. But as Ben begins to explore the trauma of his past, Annie finds herself being drawn downward into her own mental anguish. Catastrophically failed by her own therapist, she is hospitalized with a breakdown that renders her unable to speak. Then she and her gifted new analyst must uncover where her story of childhood terror overlaps with Ben's, and learn how she can complete her work with the child by creating a new story from the old--one that ultimately heals them both.

Review Quotes

"Soars into sublime meditation...what makes this book so extraordinary is her willingness to reveal exactly what goes on in the sometimes mysterious encounter between therapist and patient." --Los Angeles Times

"Ms. Rogers tells an important truth...Healers are inevitably wounded themselves, just because they are human, and Ms. Rogers...challenges her fellow clinicians to acknowledge how their own personal histories shape their work as therapists. What finally shines forth from Ms. Rogers' narrative of affliction is her stern and compassionate understanding of the 'terrible responsibility' she and her fellow therapists have 'of holding another's heart in our hands, ' while 'not forsaking ourselves.'" --Sharon O'Brien, New York Times

"A book at once somber and powerfully affecting--a story of how those of us who work psychologically with others can fail them (and ourselves) or be of great assistance. She writes a clearm honest, compelling narrative which at times sings lyrically, and constantly instructs." --Dr. Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis

"A beautifully written first-person account of a novice therapist's trial by fire... [Rogers] humanizes therapists and provides an illuminating inside view of their training and the two-sided nature of their work." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Annie G. Rogers is the professor of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Hampshire College as well as being on the faculty of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco. She is the winner of a Fulbright Fellowship in Ireland, a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, and a Whiting Fellowship at Hampshire College. She is the author of A Shining Affliction, The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma, as well as many other works, both fiction and nonfiction.