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A story's meaning is definable only after scrutinizing the particular manner in which it has been told.
Put another way, psychoanalyses are conducted by human beings.
It has taken me an unconscionably long time to get started on this review of a book I have found mostly brilliant and always helpful. Why? I think it has something to do with how the story is told. On first reading, the book appears to be an intricate and often recursive mix of theory and personal and professional development, with special attention paid to repetition, disappointment, and “the inevitability of not working through some conflicts” (p. 47). On returning to the book, however, the reader notices that this isn't simply a narrative of analytic development with an emphasis on a kind of necessary disillusionment. Embedded in Steven Cooper's argument is an erudite manifesto calling for the interrogation of any and all psychoanalytic theories for their specific clinical utility, and, less obviously, the way in which they speak to the developing analyst personally. The analyst himself is the hidden figure in this book, endlessly inquisitive and endlessly (and reassuringly) uncertain.
Noting in his introduction that he has never been very fond of the term “depressive position” and adopting Winnicott's faute de mieux characterization of the term as “a bad name for a normal process” (p. 3), Cooper orients us at once to the importance of multiple theoretical models converging on his own “normal process” development as an analyst. But it isn't