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About the Book:
I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive
Buying and the Search for Self brings together, for the first time, the
most important thinking about this disorder. As more and more therapists
encounter compulsive buying (whether as a presenting problem or revealed in
the course of ongoing therapy), the need for an in-depth clinical understanding
of the disorder has grown. Dr. Benson has responded admirably to that need
with a practical, comprehensive, and wonderfully readable work.
While the book focuses a wide-angled lens on the many
aspects of compulsive buying, it emphasizes understanding the
disorder as a desperate search for self in people whose identity
is not securely established. It defines the syndrome of compulsive
consumption, examines the range and variations within it, discusses
assessment and associated disorders, and delineates successful
treatment modalities. Offering insights from a broad spectrum
of therapies-psychopharmacology, psychodynamic therapy, cognitive-behavioral
treatment, couples and group therapy, self-help, and financial
counseling-this book is an indispensable toolbox for the increasing
number of therapists who see patients with shopping, buying, or
debting problems.
Here's What Colleagues
are Saying:
"Intellectually
and clinically substantial, I Shop, Therefore I Am: Compulsive
Buying and the Search for Self is so timely it ought to be
on bookshelves everywhere, from the consulting room to the training
institute. Given the remarkable explosion of e-commerce, Benson's
focus on this subject seems almost prescient. It is impossible
to imagine any therapist who doesn't come across the problem of
compulsive buying-and equally impossible to imagine most clinicians
having any idea about how to handle it. Dr. Benson has courage
to take on this much disparaged, yet central aspect of everyday
life."
Ron
Taffel, Ph.D.
Director,
Family and Couples Treatment Service,
Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy
"This is
an important book that should be read by every clinician in practice.
It is the first work ever to attempt-and largely succeed at-a serious,
comprehensive examination of the nature of compulsive or addictive
shopping, spending, and buying, problems now astonishingly widespread,
usually denied, and nearly always concealed…. This work is a significant
and valuable contribution to healing in the new century. Dr. Benson
has begun a much needed dialogue with this substantive and impressive
book."
Jerrold
Mundis
Author, How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt and Live Prosperously
"Shopping,
often ridiculed, pathologized as an obsession and a perversion,
and associated with frivolous women, has now been given serious,
balanced, and substantive treatment. Using current contributions
from infant research, motivational systems theory, self psychology,
and relational psychoanalytic perspectives, Dr. Benson and her contributors
add to the literature on shopping by indicating its self-sustaining
and self-enhancing aspects. Richly illustrating all aspects of the
shopping experience, this book addresses the multitude of psychological
issues encompassed and negotiated in the process of shopping."
Frank M.
Lachmann, Ph.D. and Beatrice Beebe, Ph.D.
Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity,
New York City
April Benson's
"I Shop Therefore I Am: Compulsive Buying and the Search for
Self is a comprehensive and timely examination of an understudied
but emerging public health problem. Our understanding of compulsive
shopping, along with the other impulse control disorders, is rapidly
changing and this book will surely facilitate a reexamination and
reconceptualization. Including material on shopping as a drug; gender
and self-image issues; psychiatric assessment; psychopharmacology;
and psychodynamic, couples, and self-help approaches, this book
is a tour de force."
Eric
Hollander, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry, Director Compulsive,
Impulsive and Anxiety Disorders Program, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine,
New York City.
"Dr. Benson
and her colleagues have given us the first serious, scholarly, comprehensive
(and fascinating) study of compulsive buying, its root causes, accompanying
disorders, and treatment approaches."
Joseph A.
Califano, Jr.
Chairman and President, The National Center
on Addiction and Substance Abuse, Columbia University
I Shop, Therefore
I Am
is a Shopping Bag filled with a veritable cornucopia of well-made
and carefully placed articles. Exploring the contents of this book-bag
takes the reader into its deepest depths, as if into the "fabric"
of the bag itself wherein lies the previously taboo realm of compulsive
buying, spending, and shopping. For this reason alone the book is
singularly important and a "must read" for interested
persons from a wide range of perspectives.
I
Shop, Therefore I Am is at once thought provoking and behavior
challenging. Being part introduction, part overview, and part
anthology, the book nonetheless unpacks its material with purposeful
movement and in clear and readable language. Indeed, the more
one reads, the more one wants to read! Each chapter contains compelling
insights, all of which are brilliantly woven together into a single
piece in editor April Lane Benson's own concluding essay. Nuances
of definition are revealed as writers from behavioral, biological,
psychological, social and spiritual disciplines present their
understandings of the scope and nature of problems related to
money-use, as well as assessment and treatment options.
But
Benson does not leave us consumed by the bag! Quite the contrary-in
noting that the exchange of money for goods and services can be
done as "conscious shopping" she suggests that shopping
can be about the "process of search…about being" rather
than having or buying. She thus leaves the reader searching for
the next book-bag(s?) of goodies, in which one might hope to find
essays attending to issues of culture, ethnicity, socio-economic
status and downward mobility in relation to "shopping gone
bad", as well as a fuller exposition of the reparative use
of shopping, or "shopping gone good."
When
all is said and done, however, I guarantee - after reading this
book you will never shop the same way again!
Martha
Jacobi, M. Div.,MSSW
To read the introduction
to I Shop, Therefore I Am, click
here.
To read a short interview with Dr. Benson, click
here.
To purchase the book,click here.
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