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Wearing My Tutu to Analysis and Other Stories is both a delightful title and a very useful and well-written book. Three practicing psychoanalysts—Kerry Malawista, Anne Adelman, and Catherine Anderson—have gathered stories and vignettes from their own lives and used them as brief introductions to core psychodynamic concepts, which they then explicate in greater detail. In so doing, they have developed a very clear and reader-friendly way of exploring a wide range of complex principles and examples of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The authors do intend to present not a comprehensive overview of psychoanalytic thinking, but rather a method that engages the reader.
This book could be useful as an aid in psychoanalytic education. Experienced analysts know this material and may forget how complex and confusing much of it may be to beginning students. I am currently scheduled to teach a course in psychoanalytic technique to a group of young therapists, many just out of training. They are all smart and eager, but pressed for time and relatively unfamiliar with psychoanalytic thinking. As I read this book, I found myself musing about which chapters would be useful as illustrative introductions to complex ideas. We are all appealed to by stories: introducing potentially disturbing concepts, such as castration anxiety, incest, boundary violations, and self-destructive behavior through personal vignettes humanizes and softens their emotional impact.
The book is divided into five parts: psychoanalytic theory, developmental concepts, clinical technique, treatment challenges, and stories of overwhelming loss and trauma. Part One, on theory, elucidates such