Sarah Tomley - What Would Freud Do?

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and informative

I enjoyed this book.  It's not quite what it claims to be, I think, but it is an entertaining and interesting introduction to the thinking of the best-known (and some less well-known) psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

The first thing to say is that although this book is subtitled "How the greatest psychotherapists would solve your everyday problems," it contains very few actual solutions - as you might expect from psychotherapists.  However, it does have more than I expected in the way of helpful guidance rather than just a lot of theorising about how the psyche works.  This is not in the form of "if you have problem x, then do y," but rather some helpful perspectives (and, it has to be said, some considerably less helpful ones, in my view).  For example, in the short section on procrastination and why some of us tend to put things off, I liked this quote from Oliver Burkeman (whom I'd never heard of before, by the way): "The problem…isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated." 

This is much less of a self-help book than an introduction to the thinking of various psychotherapists, which it does very well.  In the introduction  Sarah Tomley writes "feel free to pick and choose your own truths," which I found a questionable use of the word "truths," but then, we are dealing with psychotherapy here.  I can certainly agree that you need to decide which is the most helpful approach offered toward each problem.  Tomley writes very well, presenting the ideas with clarity and sometimes with wit.  There are some very clear and helpful explanations – for example of Freud's idea of the relationship between the ego, the superego and the id (although she fails to include my favourite definition of the superego as that part of the ego which is insoluble in alcohol).

Do be warned that the text is printed in a very small font which can make it a little hard on the eyes, but the general layout is friendly and I found this a readable and informative book.  Recommended.