You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The subtitle of Wearing My Tutu to Analysis is Learning Psychodynamic Concepts from Life, and, in an artful and compelling way, the authors afford just such an opportunity to the reader. Each chapter begins with a clinical or illustrative personal story, followed by a section of the authors' psychoanalytic reflections on the story. Each reflection
discusses the previous story in light of pertinent psychoanalytic concepts. The uninitiated reader will learn a good deal about psychoanalysis through the application of psychoanalytic theory in revealing the layers of meaning in the stories.
Psychoanalytic concepts covered in Wearing My Tutu to Analysis include a broad range: from mentalization to psychic equivalence; object; transitional object; the depressive position; sadomasochism; transference and countertransference; analytic abstinence; boundary violations; the frame; the Oedipal complex; idealized love; and dissociation. The range of theorists the reader is introduced to, albeit briefly, is amazing: from Freud, Ferenczi, Klein and Fenichel to Bergman; Winnicott; Kohut; Stolorow and Atwood; Deutsch; Benedek; Mahler; Pine; Jacobson, Phillips, Poland, Harold Blum, Meissner; Bach; Mitchell; Bucci; Yalom; Beebe and Lachman; Sullivan; Fonagy, Fairbairn, Bowlby, and Victor Frankl.
The stories the authors tell are immediate, affectively alive, and experience-near. The reader is repeatedly drawn into them. The reflections are accessible yet sophisticated applications of psychoanalytic concepts. It is striking that although there were three authors contributing to these reflections they are told in as seamless and consistent a voice as if they had been written by one person.
This book would make a strong introductory text for college courses in psychoanalysis as well as for the general reader interested in psychoanalysis. To this point, the authors state, “Poland's idea of ‘interpretive attitude’ within which the patient can ‘listen in’ on his internal processes in the prese