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The cover of this book includes a detailed collage of words for emotions and topics commonly associated with therapy, of which ‘anger’, ‘trauma’, ‘understand’ and ‘anxious’ are highlighted in bold. This image conveys much of the spirit in which this book of 24 short chapters is written. It contains a memoir of how the main author came to value and understand what she calls analytic therapy, as patient and therapist, and as trainee and staff member at the Arbours Association, London, UK. The style and perspective, Valentine says, is that of narrative nonfiction or genre blending. Narrative nonfiction, defined as neither purely factual nor purely fictional, here includes her vivid account of her difficult childhood and adolescence, and of her first encounters with therapy and becoming a therapist. Chapters by the three co-authors describe their experiences in the Arbours residential and crisis centres. Yet other chapters contain explications of the philosophy of the Arbours association and some dialogues portraying analytically informed interactions with an imagined person and their putative defensive presentations. Further chapters, in another shift of style, concern psychoanalytic interpretations of film. Valentine moves between the personal and the theoretical, often in illuminating ways that make this an extremely readable book, a collage of multiple forms of writing that challenges the reader to put aside any desire for more conventional or linear forms of professional writing. Dedicated to all who lived and worked within an Arbours community, this book is an important account of radical, often marginalised, psychotherapeutic history. It also contains very accessible snapshots of some basic processes of analytic therapy.
Running through this are impassioned statements of the immense value of therapy that seeks to find meaning in symptoms, that can consider context, including the
social and political, that aims for containment, understanding and interpretation.