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I have enjoyed this book; it is well timed as we start to metabolize and try to make sense of the collective trauma of the COVID pandemic. It is informative, with a visceral pull into the clinical material and an accessible narrative. It is hard to do justice to the immersive clinical vignettes and depth of thinking, I won't try to summarize in detail. It is a relatively short volume, easy to read unlike the heavier academic books of one's training often weighed down by professional language that ensures a sense of what sociologists call social closure. This is to say a form of language that is only really known and understood within a closed and highly trained group. This book feels different, more democratic, and ordinary (a much-underrated state) it seems to be aimed at understanding mental survival and overcoming wounded minds. Coming at a time close to Music's retirement, whilst he was living through and eventually emerging from the frightening pandemic or ‘ blitz’, one feels that this book tried to capture his colourful and profound thinking process whilst immersed in a global trauma and seeking to emerge.
Graham Music is a remarkable writer and teacher; he is an internationally renowned and leading child psychotherapist who has brought together multiple clinical and intellectual disciplines alongside a keen mind for the application of contemporary neuroscience and developmental psychology. His teaching and writing style are alluring and illuminating, he does this by immersing the reader or student in a language filled with feeling and curiosity. His interest in bodily states and the true sense of feelings being both emotional and physical without a sense of a split or cartesian dualism (in medical terms) is atypical (in my experience) in the British psychoanalytical traditions, but becoming more
common in practice and helped by the hugely impressive, international body of research work coming out of the intensive short term dynamic psychotherapy camp.
I note