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Received: 1 October 2025 | Revised: 1 October 2025 | Accepted: 7 October 2025
In ways more delightful than not, Kathryn Zerbe's new Secrets in Psychotherapy (2025) is like the American sitcom Seinfeld. It is a book about nothing. Of course, Seinfeld was not really about nothing; the show sniffed for comedy all around the subtle, overlooked gaps in social etiquette. It threw a spotlight onto everyday oddities, the nothings. Zerbe's most recent work does the same for psychoanalysis, mining insights from the mundane and the oft missed. She reminds her readers to listen and wait for secrets everywhere, hiding in plain sight both on and off the couch. And they animate the world in so many ways unacknowledged, distended with confessional potential. At moments, in her Secrets, Zerbe shakes a reader's attention to new subtleties—new nothings—that then coalesce around new categories of psychoanalytic understanding buttressing daily life (“You double dipped the chip!”). If Winnicott popularized the developmental capacity to be alone, for instance, Zerbe offers the capacity to keep a secret. These are the work's more shining moments.
That Zerbe does this successfully is evidence of her long experience as a certain kind of writer. To explain further, we might coarsely divide the day's psychoanalytic purveyors into three categories. First, there are the revolutionaries who shove the community forward into its next evolutions. Jessica Benjamin, Stephen Mitchell, and Thomas Ogden all fit here. Enjoying glory, these authors also have carried the heretic's risks. Second are the great synthesizers, those weaving together many psychoanalytic strands keeping a wild, disparate community disciplined and palatable: Nancy McWilliams, Glen Gabbard, and Martha Stark. While perhaps less lionized, their works manage to span the wide grounds of psychoanalysis and map them for clinical utility. Then, third, there are the expansionists, the applicators, the evangelists. Folks like Vamik Volkan, Don