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In “The Question of Lay Analysis” (1926), Freud sketched an ideal curriculum for psychoanalytic training that “would include branches of knowledge which are remote from medicine and which the doctor does not come across in his practice: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature” (p. 246). Marilyn Charles, an analyst at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, has made Freud's hope central to her writings. A prolific author, Charles has written eloquently about metaphor, myth, and the constructions of reality embedded in the stories we tell for and about ourselves. She is also a master teacher of therapeutically useful versions of theoretical concepts derived from Grotstein, Bion, Lacan, Matte-Blanco, and Winnicott, her guiding beacons in the practice of repairing broken life narratives. As President of Division 39 of the American Psychological Association, she promoted the central value of the humanities in psychoanalytic education and practice. Although Freud's curriculum also retained medical and biological training, Charles often opposes psychiatric categorization and the use of chemical interventions. For her the analytic process is a work of interpersonal transformation, the analyst a midwife to the birth of individual autonomy and authenticity.
Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Stories We Live gathers sixteen chapters, most of them amended versions of papers previously published in various psychoanalytic journals. Charles's subtitle echoes Lakoff and