Tell Us, Jerry Silver, How Do You Really Feel? — Stanley Cohen

Laced with warmth, anguish, shocks, surprises, and the joys of touching, TELL US JERRY SILVER, HOW DO YOU REALLY FEEL? Is an important addition to the literature on sensitivity training, or encounter group therapy, because of its scrupulously honest treatment of a subject so often sensationalized. The book provides a lightly fictionalized description of a weekend spent at a remote monastery with a psychiatrist, his wife, who was a social worker, and a dozen others, one of whom was the author, all curious as to what they could possibly find out about themselves. They learned a helluva lot more than they expected. There was Libby, a child-beater; Pat, a likable Jesuit priest; Alice, a confused ex-nun; Doug, who could never make a break from his mother; and Jennie, who talked openly about her lesbianism. This novel shatters the mystique cloaking this subject, leaving the reader with new insights into this therapy, and very possibly, into themselves.