ABSTRACT
Jennifer Senior quotes the work of Barry Farber, a psychotherapist and professor at Columbia University who did his dissertation on the subject. Senior says, Almost all the research that had been done on the subject, and there's been quite a lot, was on the people in the 'caring professions'—nurses, public-school teachers, legal-aid workers, social workers, clergy. Because many of these people were idealists and because they worked with the hardest-luck cases, they were highly susceptible to disillusionment. The happy therapist is stimulated by the questions that come to mind. A happy therapist can be frustrated that the hour is over too soon, just when things were getting 'hot'. The happy therapist is committed to the idea that the patient has to find her own self, unburdened by this grandiosity, and resists cooperating with the patient's pathological urges to copy her, instead of discovering her own self.
