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Mikita Brottman's Phantoms of the Clinic is likely to evoke three kinds of responses. The reader who regards logic and science to be his guides will find the book naïve, mystifying, and odd. The reader who is poetically-inclined and can hear the trees breathe will find the book charming, refreshing, and brave. And, the reader who is deft at passing “political-correctness” as humility will find the book to be unusual, interesting and worthy of attention. Now, if you are a psychoanalyst, you might have surmised that these three imaginary readers reflect my own diverse reactions to Brottman's book. All I have done is to externalize my un-integrated responses and deposited them into the psychic containers of the three imaginary readers. What was inside me has come to reside outside, not that such individuals might not exist in actuality.
And, this conundrum touches upon the essence of a book that is strikingly mysterious and yet disarmingly familiar. The former results from the author's fierce loyalty to concepts such as telepathy, thought-transference, and other “paranormal” phenomena. The latter arises from her honourable attempt to locate such occurrences in the context of psychoanalytic history, developmental theory, and clinical observation. While Brottman strives for balance, her heart belongs to the unfathomable. She registers a protest against the “quest for legitimacy” (p. 112) that has led psychoanalysis to align itself with science, and more recently, to neuroscience. She chides analysts who deny that “both analysts and analysands regularly experience moments of deep connection that challenge ordinary assumptions about what we are capable of knowing and perceiving about each other” (p. 112). But let me not get ahead of myself. Allow me, instead, to first delineate Brottman's lexicon, content, and message in some detail.
Words, phrases, and terminology sprinkled throughout Brottman's book would be new to the psychoanalytic reader. Note the following: “spirituali