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Stephanie Brody approaches her extended meditation on loss, mortality, and psychoanalysis through the lens of storytelling. The genesis of the book emerged from an unlikely place. Brody enrolled in a community education class on the Odyssey with Dr. Michael Fiveash, a recently retired teacher at the public high school in Lexington, Massachusetts.
She found him an inspired and inspiring teacher, “simply the best teacher I had ever encountered” (p. 1). Brody took four classes with Fiveash, in which she found a resonance between stories in the tradition of the classics and psychoanalysis:
The concepts of storytelling, the oral tradition, and the development of character, the effort to achieve a life of kelos—the Greek word for a noble reputation—a kind of immortality, felt familiar. That much of life was decided in the betwixt and between of liminality, that we heroically seek change despite impossible obstacles and limits, that we are often alone, but seek intimate companionship, seemed to reflect the psychoanalytic world that was my daily habitat” [p. 1].
Brody had previously published two of the chapters included in this volume, and as she began to construct a framework for the book, she imagined that Dr. Fiveash would serve as her consultant and guide. Two weeks after she signed the book contract, however, he became very ill and died. “That I decided to go forward anyway could only be regarded as an act of personal necessity: I wrote in a fever of mourning” (p. 2). An elegiac tone pervades the book. Let me say here that I believe Brody is making an assumption, rather than a strong case, regarding the resonance between storytelling in the classic vein and psychoanalysis. I feel that Brody has written two books, which run in parallel. One is about the effect on her, and on her psychoanalytic thinking, of her immersion in these stories. The other is a more traditional book about loss and resilience in psychoanalysis, as her subtitle suggests. These two projects sit somew