Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. Edited by Peter L Rudnytsky and Rita Charon. Albany:  State University of New York Press, 2008,  xii + 308 pp., $89.50 hardcover, $29.95 paperback.

Framed by introduction and epilogue by its editors, this volume assembles some sixteen contributions to a conference organized by Peter Rudnytsky in 2004, bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners to explore and clarify the commonalities and boundaries between two disciplines concerned with the care of troubled persons. Each essay in its own way addresses the roles of telling, hearing, and reading stories—“narratives”—in the healing process; ultimately, it serves as a challenging plea for a more humanistic medicine founded on the physician's empathic, respectful, and—yes—unhurried attention to each patient's story of his illness and its place in his life history.

As is usual in such multiauthored collections, the depth and quality of the papers vary, though I must say that for me, new to the idea of “narrative medicine” as a definable field, most were illuminating and often quite moving. In her opening paper, Rita Charon, a psychoanalytically informed internist who directs a program in narrative medicine at Columbia (and the book's coeditor), traces the roots of the subject in “literature, the so-called medical humanities, primary care, relation-centered care, patient-centered care, and biopsychosocial medicine. … they all in one way or another circle around language, telling, relation and the imagination. … narrative medicine designate[s] medicine practiced with narrative competence to acknowledge the urgency of time, to value the singularity of patients and self, to seek the causality and to tolerate the savage [!] contingency of disease, to dare to forge an intersubjective