A Review of When The Garden Isn’t Eden: More Psychodynamic Concepts from Life by K. L. Malawista, L. G. Kanefield, and A. J. Adelman. New York, NY:  Columbia University Press, 2022.  217 pp.

Authors Malawista, Kanefield and Adelman have put together a book of stories in which there are no characters that could claim immortality from not being declared dead, because they have all clearly lived, with all the variety of pains and sufferings that life is capable of offering. The value of this book, however, does not end with the stories of lives lived. There are messages here that can claim a right to immortality—my favorite one being that which is encoded in the title of the book—“When the garden isn’t Eden”. Yes, we all need some help when the garden isn’t Eden. And the unspoken implication is that the garden is, in fact, never Eden! Come to think of it, how is it that we have allowed ourselves to accept the phrase “garden of Eden”

as a symbol of paradise, when in fact all trouble known to humankind began there? With that title the authors of this slim volume seem to prod us out of a large illusion. It reminded me of that other classic, “I never promised you a rose garden” in which the author, Joanne Greenberg (writing under the pseudonym Hannah Green) describes her treatment with Frieda Fromm-Reichmann that helped her recover from a severe psychological illness. Many of the people who seek our help seem to carry larger or smaller fractions of this illusion, of having been deprived of some promised rose garden, or the grief of discovering that life is not a Garden of Eden. Life is a garden of Eden, but only because the “Garden of Eden” was no paradise either. Here we have twenty very short stories to prove it.