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This engaging but at the same time disconcerting little book by a colleague extols the analyst's ego ideal as the ‘guarantor of creativity and proportion in analytic treatment’. What we are offered is a dialogue, or rather an inner ballet, as the analyst's listening encounters the watchful superego of an ‘eminent colleague’, whose admonitions are foiled by ‘Nathan the Wise’, a figure identified with the analyst's inner freedom, the foundation of which is his ego ideal. As the enemy of the status quo and the guarantor of an unfailing presence, Nathan the Wise allows the analyst to indulge in a degree of madness, or at least grants him a level of imagination and freedom capable of withstanding the pitfalls of the transference relationship and of permitting the unexpected ‘breakthroughs’ whereby some treatments progress.
This somewhat demonstrative rhetoric is fleshed out when the author relates it to her own analytic journey, in which such figures as Sacha Nacht, Didier Anzieu and Anne Clancier, as well as André Green and Jeannine Kalmanovitch, play prominent parts. However, we also encounter the dancer Laban and the biblical injunction lekha (‘get thee out of thy country’) that called upon Abraham to quit Ur for the land of Canaan; these too may be found on her route towards inner freedom.