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Sharon Farber’s book, Celebrating the Wounded Healer Therapist: Pain, Post-Traumatic Growth and Self-Disclosure (2017) is an exploration of a far-reaching clinical issue, and one gaining more attention in the current psychoanalytic literature—that of exploring the psychotherapist as a wounded healer. Farber’s investigation offers a valuable exercise in learning about how our woundedness as clinicians may inform our practice of psychotherapy and how these wounded parts can be embraced as opposed to hidden. She heralds the bravery of clinicians who have publicly owned and shared their wounds, serving as role-models for a new way of thinking of ourselves as clinicians. Farber also traces the history of our profession’s relationship with woundedness. She additionally examines the ways clinicians make use of status and influence, at times unconsciously, in the clinical and professional setting and how the use of the defense of projection can sabotage potentially life-changing work.
As a social worker, psychoanalyst and scholar, Farber offers a unique and valuable vantage point to comment on woundedness in both the clinician and the profession, as well as solutions. Part I of the book conceptualizes the wounded therapist, following its presence in the history of psychoanalysis and its painful and detrimental effects on patients. In Part II, Farber relies on the honesty of wounded healers who have shared the link between their wounds and their work, demystifying and de-shaming the wounded therapist in intimate essays. The voices of these brave clinical essayists are woven throughout this review explicating their relationship to themes of influence, the nature of psychotherapy, and how emotional pain is both experienced and expressed.
Farber’s edict to celebrate the wounded therapist is a noble one that can greatly enrich our clinical work, interrupt our harmful uses of influence, and improve clinical relationships and training in the field of mental health. New therapists an