Can I Be Frank?

One periodically hears an ad on NP Radio about the 25 thousand therapists waiting in the wings and prepared to help the souls of afflicted listeners.  The implications of the ad were  disheartening, the image of an army poised to descend upon and save us from our problems!  I don’t mean to make light of the sea of troubles that life often is.

But I know someone who does. This fellow dares to make light of our troubles—the light of wit, of compassion, and of insight. Dr. Frank Pasciuti has been a licensed clinical psychologist and certified hypnotherapist for forty-five years.  He is the author of Chrysalis Crisis: How Life’s Ordeals Can Lead to Personal and Spiritual Transformation.  

Frank Pasciuti’s new book, Can I Be Frank? Poetic Insights that Empower and Inspire, embodies a novel venture into psychotherapy.  Using his own name in a title, punning on the adjective frank, turning his name into a challenge—can I be honest and thus fully myself?  That’s a universal question.  Am I in a world where it’s okay to be myself?  That’s a startling way to begin a book.

What is unique about this book is a poetics of therapy, so that by mingling prose with rhymes, half-rhymes, rhythms, and images, Dr. Pasciuti returns to a more shamanic mode of coping with our natural human difficulties.  Besides a short introduction, the book contains about sixty poems, in a rich spectrum of themes and moods, and alongside apt and witty illustrations. This is a book to be held, heard, and seen. The issues touched on run the gamut from the metaphysics of mind and body (Trivini, p.35) to matrimony, (You’re Not Who I Once Married, p.13.) You’ll learn something essential about how your mind works in Concentration, Meditation, Contemplation, p.61, and get a more humorous lift of spirit in It’s Hard to Hug a Porcupine, p.21.

The table of contents offers the reader a feast of options. The issues that plague us are infinite in variety and originality.  The format of narratives is in tune with the more or less chaotic flow of life.  It respects the reader’s freedom to begin wherever he or she wishes.  For example, I was captivated by the poem called Rattled to Insight, p. 62.  The poem was about a terrifying dream the author had that woke him up. 

                  I found myself outside walking through a path with lots of snakes.

                     They filled the ground, were all

                     Around.  I wanted to get through.

              I tried to step between them, but the spaces were so few.

Some of the ghastly rattle snakes started to move and threaten the dreamer and so he awakens and assumes a questioning stance toward the dream.  Awake now and thinking about his nightmare, there is a flash of insight:

                  I further came to recognize when my fears get denied

                  They rise up from the darker places where they tend to hide.   

So, the dream helped him see what he was not quite able to confront. This then was a poem about the interesting dialogues we may be having with the subconscious part of mental life.  Can I Be Frank? is full of hints and illustrations of how to use the poetics of our creative imagination to gain insight and heal ourselves.       I heartily recommend this book (available on Amazon) that will entertain and instruct you on the great art of being a human being.