Where Do We Look?/What do We Look For?

Muriel Dimen's edited collection, With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories, has the direct, straightforward tone we encounter when Studs Terkel gives us access to the lives of workers, only in this case the workers are psychoanalysts. These self-portraits of analysts at work provide a refreshingly clear sense of life on the ground-of what it's like, day after day, to try to affect the minds of complex people, more or less in pain, and more or less like ourselves.

And here with that, I think, runs the book's most important thread line: patients are represented as “more or less like ourselves.” Throughout the book, psychoanalytic work is portrayed as a two-person project-each person, deeply embedded in particular histories and cultures, contributing to a relationship that, if properly attended to, will positively transform both of them. Looked at this way, I think we can clearly see what might be meant by the subtitle “stories”-workers' stories, in this case-we, patients and analysts, each working and, as such, linked in that work together.

There is no hint of the practice of psychoanalysis as the practice of white-coated “science.” The consulting room is not a laboratory here; it's an intensity site, a work site, each worker aspiring toward improved conditions, laboring at the production of both private and shared “stories.”

The stories all present clinical moments in which their authors find a powerful convergence of forces: subjective, interpersonal, cultural, historical-a kind of multidimensional entirety, a dense package of meaning and power whose appearance in the clinical setting seems to allow for a radical psychoanalytic understanding, an understanding thicker and fuller-less susceptible to regressive modes of interpretation-than the kind available through earlier conceptual models.

The stories focus on what can be thought of as the intersection, the point of contact, between the ostensibly private zone of individual mind and the clearly supraindividual zone