A soft-spoken student who was once a violent hit man, an elderly man tormented by memories of wartime imprisonment, a fortune-teller who finds his therapist inscrutable, a woman who can’t get satisfaction from her mother or her therapist . . . These are just a few of the intriguing patients treated by Gerald Amada during nearly forty years of practice as a psychotherapist. From the ridiculous to the tragic, the tales of Amada’s treatment of unusual patients are fascinating, disturbing, and utterly engrossing. Amada not only lets us peek into his office but also leads us into the hearts and minds of his patients and himself.

"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