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It is accepted wisdom that book reviewers, like analysts, should strive for evenhanded objectivity, judging a book according to well-recognized literary or academic standards.
Since by even the most flexible of measures I fall woefully short of that admirable goal in writing this review, I take some comfort in the well-known fact that reviewers, again like analysts, fail as often as they succeed in attaining objectivity, and, like those colleagues who breathe a sigh of relief when, privately, they acknowledge that the ideal of neutrality regularly eludes them, I hope to ease my conscience by confessing that what I have to say about James McLaughlin's wonderful book, The Healer's Bent: Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter, lacks the barest hint of objectivity.
I blame this shortcoming on the book review editor, who, knowing that I share McLaughlin's way of thinking and working, asked me to review his book anyway. What she did not know is that for many years, ever since I read his early papers in the seventies, Jim McLaughlin has been my ideal and my personal hero.
Jim's book, a memorable collection of writing, new and old, reassures me that my initial view of him as one of the most innovative'and important'contributors to our field was not composed solely of transference.
For thirty years James McLaughlin has been writing a series of thought-provoking, often challenging papers that, in addition to being