Scenes from a Clinical Life: A Novel

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This novel provides a vital and engaging picture of current psychotherapeutic practice. It describes scenes from the life of a psychologist working psychoanalytically, including vignettes of his clinical work which present an accurate and intimate picture of a clinician at work. The protagonist's career development and his own personal therapy provide a counterpoint to the clinical scenarios.

The forward momentum in the book is provided by the protagonist's romantic involvement with another clinician, and his attempts to be accepted for training at a prestigious psychotherapy training institution. This book considers the question, what do therapists do?

The Strange Case of Madeleine Seguin: A Novel

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It is Paris in the 1880s and the century is in its final decadent throes as it moves towards the fin de siecle. New scientific ideas are countered by a resurgent interest in the practice of magic, whilst in the arts the Symbolists are exploring the strangeness of dream and the imagination.

In the Salpêtrière Hospital, hundreds of female patients are suffering from the curious malady of 'hysteria'. Many of these are being treated by hypnosis under the regime of the celebrated and charismatic Professor J-M. Charcot. One such patient is Madeleine Seguin, a young woman whose past is a mystery and who evokes a fascination and possessiveness in those who come close to her.

As well as the doctors Madeleine will encounter a young Symbolist artist, a Catholic priest, a powerful aristocrat, and most dangerously, those practising the darkest aspects of the occult, each of whom will try to save or corrupt her. She must survive them all if she is to shape her own destiny.

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Anomalous Affections: A Novel

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In middle age, Lin is diagnosed with a chronic disease. Yearning for change and solitude, she finds affirmation in the life of the eighteenth-century French writer Isabelle de Charrière. Seeking an explanation for her condition, Lin examines her own stressful childhood, torn between her father's love and her mother's jealousy. She describes her unrequited passion in her twenties for an older man - a relationship that would be repeated thirty-five years later in therapy.

In the course of this eroticised transference her feelings of love alternate with rage, and the power imbalance between patient and therapist is laid bare. She emerges with a new sense that her emotional anomalies, like her physical ones, must be accommodated, without blame or bitterness.

This is a searing tale from a patient's perspective of therapy, loneliness, and resolution.

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Freud and the Melancholy Rabbi: A Novel

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'One day they will say that Sigmund Freud read the Law with a rabbi, and no one will believe it.'

Vienna, 1903, and two unlikely figures meet: Rashab, the fifth Rabbi of Lubavitch, and Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Rashab has journeyed from Lubavitch to Vienna with his son, his future successor; the paralysis in his arm and a persistent stutter leading him to this consultation with Freud.

The two men discuss their ideologies - bringing in Kabbalah, psychoanalysis, faith, science - shining a light on their own fears and internal struggles. Freud analyses the details yet further with his distinguished pupil Wilhelm Stekel.

Taking place in a rapidly changing world, this book records a brief meeting between two individuals whose contrasting beliefs will shape the twentieth century.

The Training Patient: A Novel

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Gail May, a trainee therapist, is seeing her first patient, that all-important person on whose case study her qualification depends. As a trainee, Gail is careful to adhere to all the therapeutic rules. What she finds most difficult is that for a long time her patient, an Eastern European woman who believes she is being stalked, hardly ever speaks. Feeling starved of information, Gail begins to resort to increasingly unorthodox means. With Gail's private life falling apart her interest in her patient intensifies, growing into an obsession. When the lines between fiction and reality, between intrusion and therapy, become dangerously confused, Gail will have to face the consequences of her actions.

Telling Time: A Novel

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Everyone has secrets. Lisa Harden has spent years polishing her image as a successful psychotherapist, highly respected and well known in her field. When a new patient appears in her office asking for therapy, Lisa is inexplicably unnerved and fights hard to keep up appearances. Only when the price of keeping her secret takes her to the brink of losing everything, including her marriage, does Lisa finally return to Canada to confront her past. But it may already be too late.

The Psychoanalytic Adventures of Inspector Canal

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Psychoanalysts make the best detectives! When it comes to divining motives, deciphering ambiguous pronouncements, detecting delusions, and foiling the tricks memory plays, famed French analyst Jacques Lacan—turned self-proclaimed retired Inspector Quesjac Canal—is second to none (apologies to Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin, and Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville).

Reluctantly drawn into helping hapless New York City police detectives with crimes reported by luminaries like Rolland Saalem, music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and involving prominent personages like Tobias Trickler, Mayor of New York City, and Sandra Errand, vice president for North American sales at YVEH Distributors of Spirits, Canal solves cases that are anything but what they appear to be and mends tears of the heart and soul at the same time.

The Adventures of Inspector Canal includes three intrigues that weave together psychoanalytic themes, historical mysteries, and contemporary issues in a unique manner.

In “The Case of the Lost Object,” the conductor of the New York Philharmonic becomes obsessed about the theft from his Lincoln Center office of the slow movement from a precious original musical score.

In “The Case of the Pirated Formula,” a hard-charging businesswoman is determined to stop a Chinese counterfeit version of the famous green Chartreuse liqueur her company distributes from flooding the American market.

Finally, in “The Case of the Liquidity Squeeze,” the sex life of the beloved mayor of New York City becomes fodder for public consumption and derision when he is accused of paying for his visits to a so-called massage parlor from public coffers. The psychoanalytic themes of love, desire, and loss intertwine as important relationships develop between Canal and those he assists.

Death by Analysis: Another Adventure From Inspector Canal's New York Agency

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A stunning young analyst-in-training keels over dead in front of three hundred guests at her Institute’s annual conference. It looks like murder. But initial inquiries suggest she was liked by one and all: her teachers, supervisors, fellow-students, and even patients. New York’s finest are forced to call upon Inspector Canal, an allegedly former French secret serviceman now living in Manhattan (loosely based on the inimitable Parisian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan), to penetrate the calm demeanor of the dead woman’s professional entourage.

More daring than ever, changing identities and donning the most unlikely of disguises before, during, and even after a mad Halloween party, Canal feels his way through a minefield of denials and dissimulations, trying not to trigger any further detonations. As in his previous escapades, the Frenchman gets caught up in the misadventures of Eros while attempting to solve age-old and newer forms of crimes of the heart, grappling with the biggest mysteries of them all: love and death.