NONFICTION - Nov. 1, 1992

NEARER TO THE HEART’S DESIRE by George Weinberg (Grove Press: $22.95; 237 pp.) Weinberg sounds like the kind of psychotherapist one might like to have--engaging, animated, mindful of the part his own personality plays in any exchange, sensitive and thoughtful--and in these eight stories he attempts to show how he does what he does, and what can come of it. We meet a woman who refuses to put down the tennis racket that represents the departed glory of her life, a set of twins differently burdened by the memory of a gambling father, a nurse who must summon up the courage to pursue the man she loves. Weinberg is a graceful writer who manages to convey the delicacy of his work. Therapy is often devalued (and Woody Allen hasn’t helped its case), made to seem a simple matching game between behavior and diagnosis. As Weinberg shows, we are much trickier than that; distress can be a puzzle with dozens of pieces. An interesting book for the intellectual voyeur. One only hopes that the disguises he carefully invented to protect his subjects’ privacy are sufficient.