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Mary - a schizoid artist for whom therapy functioned as a bridge between a rich inner world ‘blessed, or cursed, with a surcharge of runaway creative energy’ (p. 139), and a depressingly dull external life.
Dan - a would-be rock star who believed he was being tape-recorded by his therapist and whose psychotic pathology deteriorated into fully-fledged paranoid episodes. His analyst joined him as a companion into his delusional system, in an attempt to help him become more empathic to his own intrapsychic and interpersonal persecutory objects.
Katherine - an ‘emotionally volatile, manic actress who acted out her rage at having to be a waitress by pouring coffee on a customer's coat’ (p. 31). Her therapist was amazed by the remarkably few credits she could show after 12 years' labour Off-Off Broadway, in spite of her obvious talents, and ‘the low priority she put on relationships that lay outside the sphere of her art’ (p. 39).
Steve - a musician who invited his analyst to his debut concert as a solo pianist. ‘He walked sheepishly across the bare stage,’ his therapist vividly recounts. ‘Seating himself at the piano, Steve suddenly - with his familiar self-torturing indecisiveness - began to wonder if the height of his stool was correct. For about two minutes, as the audience waited, Steve repeatedly raised the stool, then lowered it…’ (p. 5). As soon as he started playing, he was transformed into a self-confident, competent professional delivering ‘a dazzling exhibition of performing virtuosity’ (p. 5).
Harry - a playwright dying of brain cancer who, using denial as his main defence, impressed and moved his therapist with the ‘unwavering single-mindedness with which [he] seemed to be carrying out his soldierly resolve to live his life as independently as he could right up until the end’ (p. 118).
Gerald Alper - a psychotherapist who practised at the New York City Community Guidance Service where he acquired the unique clinical experience of analysing young, talented, aspiri