Author
Schiffer, Fredric, MD
Publisher
The Free Press of Simon and Schuster, Inc.
ISBN
0-684-85424-4
Published Date
1998

This book was rather interesting. Schiffer is a clinical psychologist who has evolved a new approach to working with patients. The approach revolves around his insights gained as a result of the cases that had had the cutting of the corpus callosum. In a number of the cases there often emerges two different personalities, that of the right brain and that of the left brain.

From his reading of the literature and with working with some of these patients he wondered if there isn’t two minds functioning in all of us all the time with one normally being more dominant or with them taking turns depending on the type of situation or problem to be solved. If true, might some psychological as well as psychiatric conditions result for conflicts between the two minds? If so, how to work out the problems between the two minds?

This is all dealt with marvelously in the book. What emerges is he developed a pair of glasses that occlude all of one eye and all but the extreme temporal visual field in the other eye. One of the pairs of glasses in the set allows only the right field in and the other only the left field. What he found was that when working with the patients in sessions that when they would wear one pair of glasses versus the other that they would feel very different and would interact with him differently. The person themselves could see and experience first one side of how they viewed a situation and then go to the other side just by changing the glasses and waiting a few minutes.

In the book he includes many verbatim transcripts of patient sessions where the transformation is remarkable.

I found the book very interesting and recommend it to you to read. Dr. Schiffer has been on a number of talk shows and news broadcasts. Some have asked that COVD consider his as a speaker at the annual meeting. This is being explored.