The Art of the Obvious

The Art of the Obvious is both a compelling teaching tool and a riveting insider's view for laymen of how psychotherapists learn their craft. The book grew out of a weekly seminar for beginning psychotherapists that was started in 1977 by Bruno Bettelheim, the renowned psychologist, and Alvin Rosenfeld, then director of child psychiatry training at Stanford University. Over the next six years, established practitioners also were drawn to the seminars to discuss difficult cases. From the raw materials of more than one hundred seminar transcripts, extensively reworked and refined, the authors fashioned five representative sessions in which they and the other participants address a variety of issues that therapists typically face - among them building a patient's trust during the first encounter; finding empathy for a violent, destructive child; avoiding preconceptions that might interfere with treatment; and assessing how psychotherapy can alleviate depression in an elderly person.
Through the illuminating discussions of each case history and its particular perplexities, the authors also contend with broader issues. As Bettelheim's final book, The Art of the Obvious gives us many of his last reflections on such subjects as his lifelong argument with the behavioral approach, his sense that research and therapy sometimes have competing agendas, and his realistic consideration of the limits of psychotherapy even in the best hands.
This book offers a moving last glimpse of a wise and humanistic teacher and an accessible, illuminating, and insightful exploration of psychotherapy, that alchemy of intuition and technique that Bruno Bettelheim called "the art of the obvious."