The Golden Condom

Starred review from January 4, 2016
Psychotherapist Safer (Cain’s Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret) offers valuable advice for dealing with the pitfalls of love in this thought-provoking and deeply useful self-help title. This is far from the typical “how to find a lover” type of book; Safer probes topics such as traumatic friendships and frenemies, unrequited love, and mentor/mentee breakdowns before examining the fulfillment that true and enduring love can bring. The book is divided into three sections—Hopeless Love, Difficult Love, and Fulfilled Love—that are punctuated with stories from both Safer’s personal life (the book’s title refers to an actual condom the author gilded and sent to a former lover) and the lives of her patients. “There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one’s fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit,” the author muses before giving advice on coping skills. Safer also traces behavior back to childhood traumas to help dig out and eradicate harmful patterns instilled (intentionally or not) by damaged parents. For anyone dealing with the intense pain caused by unrequited love, false friendships, or romantic obsessions, this book offers comfort and solid coping strategies. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary Agency.

January 15, 2016
A psychoanalyst dissects the raptures and torments of love through a series of case studies. With 40 years of experience as a psychoanalyst, Safer (Cain's Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret, 2012) has played confidante to innumerable secrets of love, from heartbreak to ecstasy. Building on her variety of experiences in the field, the author compiles the notable stories in this compendium, attempting to illuminate the mysteries of love that have so confounded, fooled, and transfixed humanity for centuries. Among the case studies Safer relates from her professional experience and personal life are tales of subjugation, betrayal, and the incapacity for love. The author even recounts her own story of unrequited love when, as a naive 19-year-old, she "fell passionately in love with a man that meant far more to me than I did to him" and withheld the details of the affair for nearly 50 years out of shame. But Safer is not solely interested in sexual love. She also relates many stories of friendship, including her first experience of loss during her separation from her roommate and best friend at college. Though the stories of jealously and embitterment are salaciously entertaining, Safer closes the collection with a section on fulfilled love. Perhaps most heartwarming is the chapter on late-life first marriage, which defies typical conventions of love as a young person's game and serves as an uplifting and optimistic ending to the woes and travails of love lost and regretted. Throughout the author's many different examples, her analysis is mostly Freudian-based (with additional credit to Heinz Kohut, "the founder of psychoanalytic self psychology"), and her insights are astute. However, since psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor, some may find that her conclusions lack empirical clarity. A highly relatable collection of anecdotes that serves as a valuable crash course on the pitfalls, seductions, and rewards of love.

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April 1, 2016

Psychotherapist Safer's (The Normal One) collection of essays is a breakdown of what it truly means to love and not be loved in return. Gathering stories from patients, friends, colleagues, and her own love life, Safer provides psychotherapeutic insight into a near and dear topic. The titular "golden condom" refers not only to a specific story of a spray-painted condom but also the idea of sexual conquest or perhaps those persons who consider themselves too worthy. Not all the accounts are sexually focused, as the doctor relates a friend's betrayal in later life to that of the disloyalty of her golden condom from years past. At the end of the day, the hurt comes from the same place. Not all of the tales are gloomy, however, and Safer provides tips and useful ideas for dealing with both the heartache and joy that comes with any form of love. She also covers some history of psychotherapy; critics of Sigmund Freud may want to avoid this one. VERDICT At times lengthy and repetitive, with footnotes that at points seem avoidable, this text can get a bit bogged down and becomes less accessible. However, the narratives and their protagonists offer the reader a mirror, friend, and confidant for personal experiences. Anyone interested in psychotherapy or simple matters of love will enjoy this title.--Kaitlin Connors, Virginia Beach P.L.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016
Drawing on her own experiences as well as those of patients and friends, Safer meditates on love's most volatile and traumatic forms: unrequited love, difficult love, betrayal, bad friendships, the intimate relationships between mentors and proteges. As a therapist, she takes a somewhat clinical approach, introducing psychology terms, when appropriate (narcissistic injury, ego strength, abreaction), which she expands upon in well-placed footnotes, explaining a term's origins or offering suggestions for further reading. Beyond the clinical, though, the text also has a philosophical and literary aspect, weaving in quotes from Samuel Johnson and Samuel Beckett, for example, as well as offering personal reflections drawn from a journal written by the author's hopelessly-, destructively-in-love, 19-year-old self. The timelessness of the topic as well as its confessional, educational content will give the book wide appealanyone will be able to find themselves reflected in one story or another, whether they are in love, or longing, or looking to understand this mystifying, powerful, innately human experience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)