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Most of us are familiar with Mitrani's exemplary psychoanalytic oeuvre, the papers and collections including invaluable theoretical contributions, as well as copious case studies that demonstrate her insight, compassion, and willingness to “take the transference,” regardless of how disturbing and ego-alien. In her novel, Couched in Blood, Mitrani brings the same qualities to her creation of the characters and inevitably, as a dyed-in-the-wool psychoanalyst, to her representation of the unfolding mystery and its resolution. A quick scan of the chapter titles in the Contents page demonstrates this: Patience and Patients, Remembering and Waiting, Impatience and Intrusion, Untangling the Web, and Envy and Jealousy. These are, of course, all elements of our work in our consulting rooms.
Mitrani's novel is in the quite populous genre of psychoanalytic detective fiction, starting with Freud himself. Psychoanalysis and detective fiction were born simultaneously in the late 19th Century. Contemporary detective fiction at that time played a significant role in shaping Freudian theory. Edgar Allan Poe gave Freud the literary precedent; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes gave him the analytical model. (Bion was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes [personal communication, ].) In turn, the world of crime storytelling embedded Freudian theories in subsequent forms, spinning the tales of crime into a journey into the human mind. As these tales were popularized on the Silver Screen in the early 20th Century, psychoanalytical ideas moved from the lecture halls into the cultural mainstream.
The analogy includes the common understanding that psychoanalysts and detectives share a common goal and methods: they interpret covert clues to reveal the truth(s). Some neo-Victorian detective novels show an awareness of this commonality when they combine psychiatry and detection. Yet, what
is also apparent in these novels is a certain degree of anachronism: what