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At the Same Time that I was reading Philip Bromberg's remarkable volume, I came across a review by Gary Wills called “Augustine's Remarkable Decade.” It is about Augustine's extraordinary work between the years 390 and 400. Concerning Augustine's writing, Wills stated something that captured for me the most interesting and enjoyable part of reading Bromberg's book, as well as his many papers: “We can watch the drama of his ideas as they emerge and struggle in his mind. The text does not deliver us a product, but calls us into a process.”
Bromberg, playful but unrelentingly, calls us into a process. Indeed, these are meditations in the best sense of the word. Bromberg takes familiar landscapes—clinical dilemmas, character phenomena, states of trauma and defensive adaptation—and tells us about his struggle and experience in a fresh, unique, and probing way. There are times when I want a product in reading, just as I sometimes do in conducting analysis. This may be something akin to wanting a patient to speak in a way that I might understand him. Yet patients don't do this in a straightforward way. Instead, Bromberg's felicitous phrase “Speak! that I may see you,” borrowed from Socrates, gets at the notion that anyone invited to say what comes to mind will also reveal, as it were, the person they wish to hide. Bromberg is able to inform us about who he and his patient are, while inviting us into a process in which we get a sense of the struggle in being seen. I have always experienced reading Bromberg's papers as