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Aisha Abbasi is to be thanked for writing us into the scope of her gifts. The gift that stands out most is her courage, and the ability to let us into her real-time inner life as an analyst—not offering us those polished, oversupervised, too-smooth stones we have all held, but her in-real-time inner life, those rough-looking geodes cracked open. She takes us along as she becomes a better and better analyst. She shares the good and the bad, and joins us in curiously observing them. One has the experience of pulling up a chair at a table across from an extraordinary person who also happens to be an analyst, and listening to her unalloyed accounts of her work with patients. She does not try to control her readers or their perceptions. She treats each of us like a trusted colleague.
The Rupture of Serenity is focused on what Abbasi calls the “external intrusions” from within the analytic process. They are the “uninvited guests” at the psychoanalytic dinner table. She describes her own infertility treatments and pregnancy barging into the dyad; swapping envy with her patients; her vulnerability attending disability or illness. She describes incidents when patients learn something “real” about us—for her, the fact of her own transgender child. Even more intrusively, patients learned about how her family handled the situation. Abbasi ventures into habitats we would rather not look at, such as the waiting room, where we do not control how our patients interact with it or with other patients; or the i-world—how technology intrudes, as when she lent a patient her iPhone after his car broke down and he i-plundered it for videos of her family. She speaks of her own and her patients' reactions to learning that Osama Bin Laden was found hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where she had spent many years as a child and adolescent. Abbasi lets us in.
To read this book is to listen responsively to how one's own mind works, as she zooms in and out of different analytic “distances,” touching