The Mystified Fortune-Teller and Other Tales from Psychotherapy

This collection of human interest stories is based on Dr. Amada’s many years of psychological practice. The author is willing to share his therapeutic successes, often happily based on good judgment and common sense, as well as his failures from his early years of training. This candid approach results in anecdotes that may have happy endings or leave us as puzzled as they left the author. Readers who are curious about the daily encounters of a psychotherapist will be entertained and intrigued by the great variety of anecdotes. -- Sophie Freud
Nearly 40 cases from the files of Californian psychotherapist Amada illuminate the broad range of clients' troubles and therapists' dilemmas. What is rare and especially of interest about this collection is its emphasis on those cases that ended in painful ‘entanglements, perplexities, misjudgments, and human culs-de-sac’ that arose between the psychotherapist and his clients. In retrospect, Amada shows, ostensible failures often yield rich insights. In ‘A Case of Vandalism,’ he confesses how his anger at a provocative patient led him to misinterpret a gesture toward relationship. In ‘The Artful Tantalizer,’ one of the few successes he portrays, Amada is justifiably proud of a flash of clarity he enjoyed that almost instantly liberated a woman from a longstanding destructive relationship. Sometimes, as in ‘The Misogynist,’ the author admits he is not sure why something he said defused a patient's homicidal rage. Another lengthy case (‘All in a Day's Work’) fascinates with Amada's account not only of the woman client's penchant for abusive men but of his fear of violent retribution by one of the abusers. Amada practices from a psychodynamic viewpoint, so most of the essays point to childhood experiences at the root of clients' emotional pain. In addition, however, he provides thoughtful glimpses into the self-questioning mind of an experienced psychotherapist, illuminating therapy as a craft rather than as an exact science. * Publishers Weekly *
[The Mystified Fortune-Teller] reveals some of the richness, demands, and complexities of [Amada’s] profession. . . . It is, by turns, humorous, sad, disquieting, challenging, gratifying, and haunting. -- Leighton Whitaker, Widener University
A lively and engaging account of the psychotherapeutic approach of a concerned and committed clinician . . . interspersed with interesting and illuminating vignettes of encounters with major leaders in the field. -- Robert S. Wallerstein, San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute
These are wonderfully told tales of a listener, knowing and wise observer, and healer—they are stories that get to the heart of what it is that happens in psychotherapy. -- Robert Coles, Harvard University