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Healing the Hurting Soul: A Survival Manual for the Black Sheep in Every Family. Louis Wynne. Charleston, SC: Booksurge (www.booksurge.com). 2007, 126 pp., $15.99 (paperback).
Louis Wynne's book Healing the Hurting Soul proves that good things do come in small packages. Dr. Wynne achieves three important goals within the 100-plus pages of this thin volume. First, he constructs a narrative for his readers that permits those suffering from emotional difficulties to understand their problems from a nonjudgmental, psychosocial perspective. Second, he thoroughly and logically deconstructs the psychiatric myth of mental illness, demonstrating in the clearest of language that words such as "schizophrenia" are moral judgments, while terms such as "diabetes" represent real medical conditions. Third, he offers advice on how to find an appropriate psychotherapist as well as deal with members of this profession to better ensure a positive outcome from the interaction.
Dr. Wynne's alternative narrative to explain the psychological troubles that have people seeking help from the mental health field harkens back to the work of Murray Bowen, Jay Haley, Gregory Bateson, and other professionals who theorized that faulty communications and "crazy-making" family dynamics were the cause of most, if not all, serious mental disturbances. In his first 4 chapters, Wynne argues that often it is the child who rebels against certain types of family rules who is selected to be the "black sheep" of the family and that it is the black sheep who develops the so-called symptoms that eventually brings him or her into contact with psychiatry. Many family rules are quite explicit, and rebellions against them rarely result in psychological difficulties. For example, every parent has struggled with their children about doing their homework or maintaining curfews, and while these can lead to unpleasant battle royals, they are carried out in public with all parties understanding the rules being argued about. The family rules that create difficulties are those that are never made explicit and indeed are often vigorously denied. For example, a child whose moves for independence collide with the unspoken rule that her real purpose in life is to remain in the family as her mother's or another sibling's caretaker creates terrible confusion and conflicts whose real purposes remain hidden.
Wynne enriches his narrative with a discussion...