Panic Attacks in Pistachio

The narrator is in the grip of a panic attack as the novel opens: his heart pounds, he sweats, he feels faint, and he fears he will die alone on a city street. He has visited the emergency room often enough to know this is not a heart problem in the usual sense. He knows that only one person has ever helped him through these episodes, and he goes to his therapist.

At his regular session, he uncovers something no patient would expect to find. The discovery sends him after the truth, a search he pursues with almost missionary determination. He questions the other patients in his therapist's world and eventually steps into her most private inner space.

There, through active imagination, he consults two of fiction's most famous detectives, Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. These inner figures help him solve the puzzle, and the process turns his suffering into the beginning of individuation. Along the way he uncovers a number of secrets, including a hidden link between pistachio ice cream and his panic attacks.

Written as a thriller and narrated in the first person, the book draws on its author's many years as a Jungian analyst.