Five Sessions: War in Therapy

Who of us has not been curious about what takes place between therapist and client. This novella offers much more. James Estades cleverly interrogates the possibility of class biases in psychological theory in his novella Five Sessions.

Christine Adams, an idealistic recent Columbia University graduate from a wealthy West Side New York City family, goes to work as a therapist in an East Harlem non-profit care center. Of course she wishes to "succeed" in her first case: that of a 59 year-old superintendent of a high rise West Side condominium who has attempted suicide three times. She wants this case because it is the most interesting of the cases she is offered her first day on the job.

Her client, however, Vidal Estrella, is a much more recalcitrant and complicated client than she's bargained for - a 70's era social activist, the champion of several lost causes, well read, better educated than he admits, and despairing on a level the 24 year-old can only learn to understand. It is he who asks her the story's key question, "Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had had therapy three times a week?"

In the end, the story is, for Adam's its narrator, the account of a major disaster. But it's a disaster from which she grows, albeit painfully. She winds up, paraphrasing Estrella's question in her own way. "Now I know we live with a pathology that will never be taught in psychology class." An excellent read for anyone, therapeutic professional or lay person, interested in human communications, conscious and unconscious.

About the Author
Estades, Jaime: - "Jaime Antonio Estades was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University and received his Juris Doctor from the City University of New York School of Law, and his Master's in Social Work - from the Hunter College Silberman Graduate School of Social Work. Jaime continues to inspire the next generation of community activists, as an Adjunct Professor teaching Social Welfare Policy at Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work and Social Policy, Advocacy, and Law and Social Work at both NYU and Columbia Graduate Schools of Social Work.Jaime has committed his life to advocacy, education, health and leadership training. For the past 35 years, he has been working on issues relating to education, immigration, housing, voting rights and registration and family entitlement issues. Estades is the Executive Producer of the documentary Let My People Vote, which chronicles the 2016 Presidential election in Orlando, Florida. In 1996, Jaime founded the Latino Leadership Institute, Inc. (LLI) where he still presides as Executive Director. In October 2015, the Latino Leadership Institute was selected by the White House as one of the Bright Spots of Excellence in Education in the Hispanic Community in the United States."