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Howard Shevrin presents us with a novel that is unusual in three ways. It is freely available on the Internet. It is a 327-page free-verse poem. It is entirely about psychoanalysis. So, is it something more than a curiosity?
Shevrin says that he has written a novel with psychoanalysis itself as the protagonist, a novel in which the inner pulse of analytic work reveals itself. Almost all of the action is confined to the consulting room. Almost all of the characters interact directly with only one other, patient or analyst, in a succession of psychoanalytic hours. Shevrin believes that, like ancient Greek theater, psychoanalytic work intensifies human drama and reveals the essences of human character and experience.
Verse, says Shevrin, captures the paradoxes of psychoanalysis: emotionally demanding emotional distance, one-sided but mutual emotional risk, and metaphor in ordinary speech. He sees these paradoxes as part of a rhythm that arises in the work from repetition within the living psychoanalytic form. The strict form and the repetition create choruses and refrains.
Shevrin hopes that in The Dream Interpreters he has conveyed the limitations of psychoanalytic work. He says that he wants readers to see the dual nature of psychoanalysis as art and science, and to understand how hard it is to become a psychoanalyst and to practice psychoanalysis. This is a tall order. Does Shevrin deliver the goods?
The Dream Interpreters is set in late 1950s Tennessee at a psychiatric institution that combines psychoanalytic work and training with outpatient and inpatient treatment and psychiatric research. The cast of characters unfolds, two at a time, as part of an enmeshed network. Frances Dreyfus, whose psychoanalytic-trainee husband Paul is analyzing Emily Patterson while in a training analysis with Foucault, is in analysis with Victor Kleinman who is himself in analysis with Kurt Denkman while his trainee wife Marlena is in a training analysis with Bernard Freeman. Denkman's