Lasting Relations / Les Relations durables: Amoureuses, amicales et professionnelles

"Today, in our working lives, it has become totally banal to be at odds with our colleagues, in a state of latent conflict with our superiors, and at a loss about how to handle our subordinates. In our private lives, we ignore our neighbours and fied it hard to make real friends. Our love lives are fraught with danger: we are afraid to commit, and once we do, two out of three marriages end in divorce. We no longer understand our children, and their attitude toward us is equally uncomprehending."As a psychiatrist, I see patients every day who seem to blunder through their emotional lives, dooming their relationships to failure. How can such fiascos be explained? And, above all, how can these cycles be broken?"It seems to me that we have very many wrong notions about human relationships. For example, it is said that the more you give the more you receive, but it is precisely the reverse that occurs. Many other false beliefs can be held responsible for destroying the "great love of our lives", or of turning the mother-child relationship into a nightmare. "By telling some true stories, as well as by borrowing models of comprehension from neurophysiologists, ethologists and anthropologists, I have tried to reveal the elementary foundations of human relationships in order to define how each one of us can make the best use of these relations in our daily lives," writes Gérard Apfeldorfer.This is a practical, stimulating and brilliant book, which instead of insisting on the self focuses on relationships, and offers renewed hope for personal development.Gérard Apfeldorfer, a medical psychiatrist and psychotherapist, is a member of the French Association of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapy and a contributing editor to Psychologie Magazine. He is the author of Maigrir c?est dans la tête and Maigrir, c?est fou!, both published by Editions Odile Jacob, and of Apprendre à changer and Pas de panique!