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After a performance of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony led by Leonard Bernstein, a listener approached the maestro and asked, “What is it that Mozart puts into his music that makes it so powerful?” Bernstein is said to have replied, “Dear boy, it's not what he puts in, it's what he leaves out.” Ellen Pinsky's Death and Fallibility in the Psychoanalytic Encounter is built around an understanding of what is missing—of loss, transience, and vulnerability, particularly in relation to evocativeness and ethical responsibility. In this short collection of essays, Pinsky's extraordinary power as a writer mirrors these themes. Her book is designed to evoke powerful responses in the reader, by the magic of words, both her own and those borrowed from novelists, playwrights, and poets. Pinsky avoids comprehensive, systematic exploration of core subjects central to her arguments (e.g., countertransference, enactment, abstinence, neutrality, and boundary violation), all of which is available elsewhere. When needed, each concept is illustrated clinically and connected to its theoretical origins but is not, in keeping with her essay format, buried in a torrent of scholarly historical exposition. Pinsky aims instead to move her reader, and her discipline, to both scold and valorize. I felt moved to do both, in addition to feeling enormous admiration for her having captured the majesty and audacity of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
Pinsky's essays are organized around two interrelated clinical domains that propel her argument. On the one hand, the analyst may fail the patient via his mortality and human fallibility. On the other, the psychoanalytic situation, as originated by Freud, invites the patient's passionate attachment and desire to be met only with verbal exchange. Pinsky exposes the evocative, the dangerous, the transformative, and the healing