Here are six books for this summer. Three that speak directly about our profession, one that questions our times, and two that have nothing to do with therapy. On the surface, at least.

Ça ne sera plus toi la victime, by Pierre Bordaberry

Pierre Bordaberry, whom many know as Psykocouac, is one of those popularisers who take their readers seriously. His book tackles a question we encounter every week in consultation: how to move out of the victim position without denying what was suffered.

Push too hard on moving out, and you tip into the injunction to resilience — that polite form of violence which asks people to get better for other people’s comfort. Insist too much on victim status, and you freeze the person in an identity that strips them of their power to act. Pierre holds both ends of the rope, and that is what makes the book so valuable for us: it offers footholds for accompanying that delicate movement in which someone stops defining themselves by what was done to them.

For systemic practitioners, it inevitably brings to mind the relational games that keep everyone in their place — the victim included. A book that dialogues very well with our models.

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En écoutant Guy Ausloos, by Frédérique Allimann

Guy Ausloos is one of those figures from whom a single sentence can reorganise an entire practice.

How many of us have built our clinical stance around this idea?

Frédérique Allimann’s book reads like an apprenticeship at the master’s side. We listen to Ausloos as he thinks, and we find again what makes his voice singular in the systemic field: a radical trust in families’ competence, the refusal of the expert stance that would know better than people what is good for them, the attention paid to relevant information rather than exhaustive information.

It is a book that both rests and demands. It rests because Ausloos gives us permission not to carry everything. It demands because it reminds us that this apparent lightness requires considerable clinical rigour. Trusting the system does not mean doing nothing. It means doing something else.

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La thérapie en société, edited by Vincent de Gaulejac

No one ever heals in a vacuum. The suffering that arrives in our consulting rooms is woven from the social fabric: precarity, pathogenic management, injunctions to perform, contemporary loneliness. Acting as though everything played out in the individual psyche, or in family interactions alone, amputates the reading.

Vincent de Gaulejac, a leading figure in clinical sociology, brings together contributions that question therapy’s place in the social body. What do our practices say about our times? What are we doing, collectively, when we individualise forms of suffering that have structural causes?

For a systemic practitioner, this book naturally extends a gesture we know well: widening the frame. We learned to move from the individual to the family. This book invites us to keep the movement going, from the family to society. Dizzying, sometimes uncomfortable, but necessary.

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Machines maternelles, by Serge Tisseron

Serge Tisseron has been observing our relationship with screens and machines for years, without catastrophism or naivety — which is already rare. With this book, he tackles a phenomenon we are seeing emerge in our consultations: machines designed to care for us, listen to us, reassure us. Machines that occupy a maternal function.

The question is no longer whether people will talk to artificial intelligences about their inner states. They already do, massively. The question is to understand what is at stake in that bond: what is a presence that never tires, never judges, never asks for anything in return? What does it do to our capacity to bear real otherness — the kind that resists, that disappoints, that has needs of its own?

For us therapists, this is strategic reading. Our patients arrive with these uses, and sometimes with these attachments. Better to have thought it through before they bring it up in session.

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L’homme révolté (The Rebel), by Albert Camus

Let us step outside the professional field. Or so it would seem.

Camus published L’homme révolté in 1951, and the book earned him a definitive falling-out with Sartre. His thesis can be stated in a few words: revolt is what founds our common humanity — “I rebel, therefore we are”. But every revolt carries within it the risk of turning into its opposite, of justifying new horrors in the name of liberation. Hence the demand for measure — that unspectacular word, so difficult to live by.

Why read it as a therapist? Because we work with revolts every day. The adolescent’s against their family, the patient’s against their symptom, families’ against institutions. And we know from experience what Camus formulates philosophically: a revolt that cannot find its measure destroys what it wanted to save. The symptom itself is often a revolt gone wrong, a protest that has become a prison.

Camus is to be read slowly, and summer lends itself to that. And his prose, dry and luminous, washes all jargon away.

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Stoner, by John Williams

And to finish, a novel. Published in 1965, ignored for decades, rediscovered with fervour: Stoner tells the life of William Stoner, a literature professor at a Missouri university. A life without brilliance. A failed marriage, a hindered career, rare and quiet joys.

Nothing happens, and everything happens. Williams pulls off the feat of making profoundly moving an existence the world would call insignificant. He watches his character with an attention so precise, so free of judgement, that every small event takes on the weight of a destiny.

If that gaze reminds you of something, it should. It is exactly the one we try to bring to the people we see: an attention that does not rank lives, that finds no existence too ordinary to deserve telling. Stoner may be, without meaning to, one of the finest books ever written on the clinical stance. You come away from it with a renewed tenderness for minuscule lives. Which is to say, for all lives.

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Reading to let it work

Six books, three territories: our profession, our times, literature. You could read just one. You could also read them out of order, abandon one halfway through, come back to another in September.