
DATE: Thursday, October 2, 1997             TAG: 9710020811

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review 

SOURCE: BY TEMPLE WEST 

                                            LENGTH:   82 lines

GIVING OF ADVICE ON RELATIONSHIPS IS BROUGHT INTO FOCUS

SHOULD I STAY with my partner, or should I leave this relationship?

``All you want is a simple piece of advice.''

That's the opening sentence of Peter Kramer's latest book - the sentence from which the whole book flows, he says. And when we want advice, especially about marriage and relationships, we can do no better than to ask it of someone who is thoughtful and probing, and who honors not only the complexity of life's situations but also the spirit of the need that we bring in even asking for advice.

We live in the midst of a culture that esteems autonomy and self-reliance. We struggle, says Kramer, toward Emersonian ideals of being true to ourselves, and these are the values championed by today's pop forms of self-help and advice. Kramer never denies the importance of individuality and self-differentiation; he merely questions how they fit with our fundamental human drive to relationship and attachment - the same way he questioned, in his best seller ``Listening to Prozac,'' what the cost was of medicated ease.

``Yes, the men and women attained relief'' when taking Prozac, he writes, ``but perhaps something precious was lost in the process . . . sometimes I sense a loss - of intense specialness, perhaps of intensity altogether.'' And in ``Should You Leave?'' he says that perhaps the ideal of autonomy comes at the cost of the beauty of connection.

Kramer is clearly on the side of marriage, relationship and sticking with it, but this is not the hackneyed, step-by-step, how-to advice book that sometimes follows an author's best seller. Creatively conceived, ``Should You Leave?'' is an intelligent, educational and well-written work. Kramer is not only a fine psychiatrist who teaches at Brown University and has a private practice in Providence, R.I., but he is serious about the craft of writing.

Rather than the cliched use of examples of real patients, ``with names and details changed,'' the patients in this book are ``you.'' This use of a second-person protagonist is an inspirational ``act of presumption that invites an oscillation between empathy with and distance from a particular imagined life.'' ``You'' are the composite patient who comes for advice.

There are several ``yous,'' presenting different dilemmas in matters of the heart. Interwoven within the context of several of ``your'' relationship stories is the history of some of the important psychoanalytic theories and philosophies of relationship, like those of Freud, Bowen, Miller, Nagy and others. The thread that ties all of this together is the character of Lou, a fictional mentor who is drawn from many of Kramer's dedicated teachers.

Lou forces Kramer to review and refine all of these theories until he can come to the point of saying: ``Yes they are bright people, but no brighter than you. They are simply men and women with their own histories, their own perspectives, expressed in theory.''

Throughout the book, Kramer questions the nature and efficacy of advice: whether he, or anyone, should give it (his training predisposes him against dispensing it), and how to give advice to a culture that does not value affiliation as highly as self-enhancement, if advice is helpful. He is still questioning at the end, but we have come to understand that, for good or ill, his advice might open up our world.

What we get, ultimately, from Kramer is a sense that he has taken a great deal of time to know ``us'' well. He has to, else he wouldn't be giving advice but merely transmitting his own values in an effort to define ours. And that is not his role. While we may rebel at the advice he gives, which usually is to stay in a relationship (although he does recognize that some relationships don't work), and even reject it, we have to know that he is not simply a lightweight optimist.

In ``your'' sessions with him, he has empowered you to the point that ``what you must do will seem obvious.'' There can be no better advice. MEMO: Temple West is a student in the M.F.A. creative writing program at

Old Dominion University. She lives in Norfolk.Temple West is a student

in the M.F.A. creative writing program at Old Dominion University. She

lives in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

``Should You Leave'' addresses the reader in a personal manner.

Graphic

BOOK REVIEW

``Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy

- and the Nature of Advice''

Author: Peter D. Kramer

Publisher: Scribner. 320 pp.

Price: $25