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The British analyst Marion Milner begins her prescient book, On Not Being Able to Paint (1957), by wondering if her “preconceived ideas about beauty in drawing might have a limiting effect on one's freedom of expression.” When self-conscious cogitation fails her, Milner considers that “beauty might be like happiness, something which a too direct striving after destroys” (p. 5). An entire volume later, she concludes that painting indeed requires “A-never-before-known wholeness” involving “thought and sensation and feeling and action,” the result being “not a lessening of the objective powers but a strengthening, once the needs of their opposite have been given recognition … this different kind of sense of self that grew out of creative concentration had bearings upon one's relation to the whole mass of other selves that one was in contact with” (p. 142).
Only years later, however, as a result of the seminal writings of Philip Bromberg (, 2006), has the felicitous clatter of the consulting room been recognized as central to the analytic process and therapeutic action. It is not that Bromberg's current volume, The Shadow of the Tsunami and the Growth of the Relational Mind, lacks careful thought and scholarship, drawing as it does from the likes of Harry Stack Sullivan, Emily Dickenson, D. W. Winnicott, Edgar Levenson, Robert Burns, and research in neuroscience (hence the laudatory foreword written by the neuropsychoanalyst Allen Schore). Yet, as Milner suggests, received wisdom is not always relevant, or not exclusively so. Thus, Bromberg shows us the work—the dyadic bumping up against otherwise forbidden and foreboding