http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/books/review/13harrison.html

As a child, Annie G. Rogers—whose father killed himself when she was five—was repeatedly molested and abused by her mother. By the time she was a teenager, she was hearing voices and slipping in and out of psychosis. It was only with psychiatric help that she was able to come to terms with her early experiences and to build a healthy life for herself. Today, she is a psychotherapist, specializing in the treatment of traumatized children and enjoying a reputation for healing those considered the most “unreachable.”

In The Unsayable, she chronicles her development as a therapist and outlines her unorthodox approach to treatment.

Given the horrifying magnitude of what most of these children have been through, she explains, straightforward attempts to discuss their trauma tend to be fruitless. It is only by learning to decipher coded allusions in a child’s artwork, dreams, and seemingly mundane gestures and words, she suggests, that the therapist can access the hidden source of a child’s pain and help her to move beyond it. Though Rogers’s theory seems at times a bit pat—each patient is, after all, construed as a puzzle to be “solved”—it is clear from her sensitive accounts of the cases she’s worked on that she is a perceptive therapist, and, more important, an effective one.