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On Bearing Unbearable States of Mind is the thirty-fourth book in the New Library of Psychoanalysis series. Many books in this series offer compilations of papers spanning many years of their authors' work. In the case of Ruth Riesenberg-Malcolm's book, the reader is treated to twenty-five years of her writings, in which one can see the development and consistency of her theoretical and clinical ideas.
A collection of papers does not always provide the smooth and coherent evolution of topics that a monograph does, and that is true here. However, this is a minor criticism of an otherwise useful collection of papers, excellently organized and edited by Priscilla Roth. Readers of this book will be aided by Roth's succinct reviews of the papers and the points of focus that she highlights, particularly in parts I and II. Some of Riesenberg-Malcolm's papers have been updated for this publication, and they are gathered here according to subject matter rather then chronologically. Although this is a useful organization for the book, the sections are not neatly separated and the distinctions between them are at times difficult to ascertain.
While Riesenberg-Malcolm is not as well known to many in the United States as some of the other contemporary Kleinian writers, her writings are read widely in England, Europe, and South America. She herself is a native of South America (Chile), and trained in the British Psychoanalytic Institute within the Kleinian group. In her various papers we can see close ties to Bion, Segal, and Joseph in particular, and also the extension of some of the ideas of Steiner and Britton.
In my attempts to review a book with the scope of Riesenberg-Malcolm's, I was most struck by the details of the her clinical work with the array of patients that constitutes an analyst's practice. Firmly based in Kleinian theory and technique, Riesenberg-Malcolm shows