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.
Introducing a book whose subject matter may initially make many prospective readers shrug or even bristle is a bit of a challenge, particularly when giving it an enthusiastic review! Psychoanalysts don't generally put getting informed consent high on their list of priorities and are certainly not fond of being told what to do by nonclinicians, like lawyers.
Elyn R. Saks is well aware of this. As she says, in the first words of Informed Consent to Psychoanalysis: The Law, the Theory, and the Data, “Psychoanalysts have been up in arms about… legal intrusions…” (p. 1).
Yet Saks and her coauthor, Shahrokh Golshan, explore their topic with such sensitivity and intellectual seriousness that any analyst who reads their book is bound to be won over. Indeed, Informed Consent to Psychoanalysis is imbued with a sense of authenticity and near urgency which makes it truly compelling. My guess is that the tone comes from Saks and results from the fact she's writing about a subject of great personal meaning to her.
As many readers will know, Saks is not only a powerful advocate of psychoanalysis but also a lawyer and ethicist with stellar academic credentials. She's a Yale Law School graduate, and a professor of law, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, with a Ph.D. in psychoanalytic science; she used her well-deserved MacArthur Foundation “genius award” money to establish the Saks Institute for Mental Health Law, Policy and Ethics. What gives Saks undeniable credibility in the analytic world, though, is her profound personal experience in psychoanalysis.
It is impossible to read Informed Consent to Psychoanalysis without having Saks's (2007) powerful and poignant memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, come to mind. Although Saks had a psychotic break while she was at Yale Law School, her real slide into psychosis took place later, when she was studying as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and in analysis with a Klei