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Janet Malcolm (1977) called psychoanalysis the “impossible profession.” If the practice of the profession is indeed “impossible,” effective and persuasive writing about it—writing that deeply conveys the analysand's daily struggles in an analysis—is beyond impossible. Most accounts are either emotionally laden or formulated with an emotionless clinical pseudo-objectivity. In Slow Fuse of the Possible: A Memoir of Poetry and Psychoanalysis, Kate Daniels avoids these extremes and accomplishes a beautiful and persuasive, almost impossible to write, memoir.
A book depends above all on great writing, and Kate Daniels, a poet, knows how to craft words. Sentences flow with balance and grace, surprise and wit. So many lines stop one's reading with their balance, elegance, and sonorities. Take for instance the following sentence; it required some minutes for me to get past its sheer elegance:
We fall out of the discourse of the everyday into a liminal consciousness where language hovers, exerting its pressure but withholding our apprehension of its forms [p. 36].
In this, and other quotes to follow, the language is always masterful.
Although the book is a memoir, it reads like a novel where the analysand-protagonist shows herself to be valiant and courageous, biting and sarcastic, sublime and moving. She captures the reader's sympathies from the start. We want her to get what she needs from her psychoanalysis. Enter Ama, the aloof, proper, pearl-draped analyst-in-training who makes mistakes, is locked into a very classical mode of psychoanalysis, and is ill equipped for the real and metaphoric Jacob-Angel wrestle from which the patient as Jacob will emerge slightly wounded but with a new name and a new sense of purpose.
The book is exceptionally well paced. It moves fluidly between reflection and representation of mental process to the action of what's-happening-next. Will the protagonist-analysand be understood? Will she again be rebuffed, rejected, and frustrated? Will the