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One of the first associations I had while reading Sandra Buechler's precious book was represented by the concluding remark of the address given by the sociologist Charles Johnson at the memorial service for his very dear friend and colleague social scientistH.S. Sullivan, held on February 11, 1949, which Helen Swick Perry included in Sullivan's anthology The Fusion of Psychiatry and Social Science. «It is one of the strangest paradoxes of our civilization that the simplest human virtues and those which alone give us the right to call ourselves civilized are precisely those which demand the highest courage to translate into life and honest social action». It is not a coincidence that this attempt at integrating human values (she calls them «clinical values»!) into analytic technique comes from a colleague trained in the Interpersonal tradition (a psychologist, Sandra Buechler is Training and Supervising analyst at New York's W.A. White Institute), centered as it is around Sullivan's one-genus postulate and Fromm's classical wisdom (of Terence's saying «Humani nihil a me alienum puto»). As a matter of fact, the book represents volume one of the new book series «Psychoanalysis in a New Key», edited by Donnel B. Stern (the present editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis) for The Analytic Press.
Two more voices, which must have significantly contributed to the author's discovery of her own analytic identity, are those of the late Stephen Mitchell and of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, which we come in contact with through six quotations (three for each of them) taken out of Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis and Letter to a Young Poet, which the author placed before her own preface. What binds them together is the sense of curiosity, humility, patience and courage, which substantiated their approaches to psychoanalysis and literature, respectively. After having given further credit in the preface to her peer supervision group (her professional «family» for over twenty yea