Einstein never did therapy, but therapists still like to use this quote from him: “A problem cannot be solved by the consciousness that created it.’’ Meaning, it’s really hard to recognize our hurtful patterns, much less probe and change them, without outside insight. Props to those who’ve sought help. But now August is upon us — when help heads for sand and surf or the south of France. Until your sessions resume, these fine, helpful books on the therapeutic experience may help hold you over.

I spied Einstein’s words in “Letters to a Young Therapist’’ (Basic, 2016, first out in 2003) by Mary Pipher of “Reviving Ophelia’’ fame. Part memoir, part broad perceptions and pointed anecdotes about the power of therapy, it’s all addressed to her favorite grad student at the University of Nebraska. The tone? Warm, verging on homespun. But Pipher’s no trifler: She admits that “[l]ife makes most of us unhappy’’ and that sessions can be “plain plodding.’’ But I thought of my own wonderful therapist when she described her outlook: “I am not listening to problems. I am listening for solutions.’’

Her patients run the gamut of sorrows and challenges — from a gold digger, to a white supremacist, to an octogenarian who pranks Pipher with a whoopee cushion. No matter who, though, she tries to help instill a higher tolerance for ambiguity. “I have acquired a lifelong tuition-free education in the consequences of various choices,’’ she marvels. Her top takeaway? “Most of the craziness in the world — violence, addictions, and frenetic activity — comes from running from pain.’’

Craziness, both bizarre and poignant, gallops through “The Mummy at the Dining Room Table: Eminent Therapists Reveal Their Most Unusual Cases’’ (Jossey-Bass, 2003), edited by Jeffrey A. Kottler and Jon Carlson. It’s a sort of Oliver Sacks-light anthology. I was moved especially by “Reconstructing the Jigsaw Puzzle of a Meter Man’s Memory,’’ as therapist Robert Neimeyer helps a man who was robbed and beaten to “find significance and mastery in the wake of a disrupted life story.’’

And I have to admire therapist Pat Love, who calms a cashier upset that someone emptied the register on his watch in “An Emergency Hypnosis to Solve the Crime at the Burger Joint.’’ The cashier believes if he gets hypnotized he’ll be able to recall the culprit, but he’s worried that hypnosis may lead to astral projection, and he won’t come back. “I know some might make the case that this guy was delusional,’’ writes Love. But “I honored his reality.’’ Hypnosis does indeed solve the crime, and the patient leaves feeling both heard and respected.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction can sometimes tell the larger truth. And so to “On the Couch: Great American Stories About Therapy’’ (Atlantic Monthly, 1997), edited by Erica Kates. Such plum writers here, including Donald Barthelme, Frank Conroy, Amy Bloom, and Lorrie Moore. I was chilled by “The Age of Analysis’’ by Lynne Sharon Schwartz about a disturbing 15-year-old boy and his therapists. Meanwhile, Lawrence Block’s “Keller’s Therapy’’ presents a quasi-Dr. Melfi-Tony Soprano narrative.

Anyone in treatment knows how a therapist’s deceptively simple utterance can change everything. Leave it to John Updike in his story “The Fairy Godfathers’’ to crystallize this: “ ‘That doesn’t seem to me so very bad,’ the psychiatrist said, with the casual power of delivery attainable at only the highest, thinnest altitude of wisdom. It was like golf on the moon; even a chip shot sailed for miles.’’

To my mind, no therapist/author sails more moon golf shots than Irwin S. Yalom. He’s written some 15 books of fiction and nonfiction (and been likened to O. Henry and Isaac Bashevis Singer), but his second work speaks to me most deeply. In “Love’s Executioner: and Other Tales of Psychotherapy’’ (Basic, 2012, first out 1989), we get 10 essays in which we eavesdrop on his sessions — so much grief, transference, denial, and confusion! Throughout, he both observes his patients and himself with refreshing self-criticism (“I stretched for supportive and constructive words, but they came out more pedantic than I intended.’’).

The title essay concerns a 70-year-old stuck on an obsessive, unrequited love from years ago. Yalom wants her to move on, “to yank the whole weed out’’ but realizes that the more impoverished her present life, the more the obsession grows — and thus the therapy is aimed toward bolstering her todays over her yesterdays. That same past-overwhelming-the-present theme holds for “The Wrong One Died,’’ in which a mother visits the grave of her daughter daily — and neglects her living sons in the meantime.

I’ll end with some august words for August, again from Einstein. True, he didn’t seek help — though he was an enthusiastic pen pal with Freud — but I’d say his insights apply to therapy as well as relativity: “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.’’

Katharine Whittemore is a freelance writer based in Northampton. She can be reached at katharine. whittemore@comcast.net.