On Therese Ragen's “How Far to the Moon?”

I SOMETIMES WONDERED, during the long walk home after my weekly therapy session, how it might ever be possible to re-create in prose something of what was occurring in that room, for it seemed to be of the most elusive and amorphous nature—something so subtle, so shifting, so outside of the kind of narratives one likes to tell oneself. How to allow these oblique movements of mind and emotion onto the page? The challenge would be to try to approximate its assertions, its erasures, its incremental, repetitious, often exasperating nature, its moments of surprising lucidity. How to describe that room's tenor and the combination of exhilaration, exhaustion, sorrow, frustration, hope, it called up in me—the distances traveled some days in a matter of moments, and at other times the incredible, almost stopped, slow motion of it all. How fragile I often felt, and at once how resilient: now tough, now collapsed. It was an experience that seemed to me at once intimate and estranging. Cues given, passed from patient to therapist and back again, re-shaped, reformulated, rephrased, elaborated. How to get some of those rhythms right? From my position as patient in the room, how amorphous it seemed and yet shapely, how fluid, how shifting. How porous are human beings, I thought, and how elusively we come to understanding.

Therese Ragen's “How Far to the Moon?” begins to approach some of the ways in which this progress occurs. That she does so with such subtlety, honesty, and sensitivity is a testimony to her respect both for the psychoanalytic process and to the process of writing. Her belief in the potential of each make this in many ways a remarkable piece. She has captured—but captured is the wrong word—the ineffable process of coming to trust. With delicacy she holds moments of a mysterious exchange on the page. The ways of coming closer to a patient, of pulling away, nearing again but from another angle—the tentative, the errant. Something slowly crystallizes, assuming a shape