He turns to leave. She remains silent; her eyes follow him as he leaves and then she goes back to her chair and picks up her magazine and the memory of their exchange fades from her mind.

The psychologist drives on down the winding highway. His eyes are wide open. His mind is pacified like a sleepy baby. His obedient heart beats slowly inside his chest. Darkness all around.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my Israeli editor, Rana Werbin, my agent, Jennifer Joel, and my editor at Holt, Helen Atsma, for their friendship, support, and expertise and for their tireless joint effort on behalf of this book. I also wish to acknowledge the theorists and researchers whose ideas and formulations echo throughout this book. These include Alfred Adler, Gordon Allport, David Barlow, Edna Foa, Sigmund Freud, Harry Harlow, Steven Hayes, Jerome Kagan, Abraham Maslow, Paul Meehl, Robert Sapolsky, and Daniel Schacter. Finally, I wish to thank Mia Lewis, my partner in life and in writing, who has spent countless, often thankless hours editing, tweaking, polishing, sculpting, and nursing this text into shape. Without you this book would not have come to be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noam Shpancer was born and raised on an Israeli kibbutz. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Purdue University. Currently he is a professor of psychology at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, and a clinical psychologist with the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy in Columbus, Ohio, where he lives with his daughter, Maya.