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This intriguing and unusual book is the product of a major contributor to the psychoanalytic field. Donald Moss has written over sixty published articles, and this is his fourth book, if we don't count a collection of short stories that came out early in his career. This book doesn't read like a short story or an essay or really even a poem. Maybe it's more like a series of Zen koans, statements used to test the progress in Zen practice. The koan is meant to stir greater and greater degrees of uncertainty and self-doubt, even to the point of desperation, such that the student eventually realizes there is no meaning to the koan except what the student attributes to it. The student may come to realize that the desperation and self-doubt too are constructed in the mind to protect against being alive, awake, and emotionally and spiritually present in the moment.1
For one year, Moss wrote down one sentence spoken by his patients, one from each session. Nothing more. No context. No reply. No commentary. Here he presents the selected sentences day by day. When I heard Moss present this work at a scientific meeting at my local analytic society,2 he began with an illuminating introduction. I regret he has not included it in the book. It offered an essential foundation for understanding the selected sentences that follow. Without it, the reader is left to wonder what this book is all about. I speculate later in this review about its omission. I cannot undo having heard it and thought about it, so I include a description and commentary on his oral introduction.