American psychoanalysis has several prominent figures whose ideas have been extensively published in various forms, from textbooks for beginners to more elaborate selections of theoretical and clinical essays. The purpose of such books is to highlight the ideas of their authors, specially if the authors are the founders of a school of thought. Generally these books are a kind of master class.

Rarely are such books a live history of their authors' psychoanalytic experience, an invitation to dialogue, a conversation with the reader. Warren Poland's Melting the Darkness is, however, one of those rare books. Poland belongs to the same talented psychoanalytic generation as Boesky, Jacobs, Schafer, Ted Shapiro, psychoanalysts trained in the most strictly classical tradition, who, all original thinkers, so to speak broke ranks with the absolutism of their teachers and institutes and yet stopped short of claiming to have started a revolution. Respecting all the basic elements of their background, and unquestionably devoted to psychoanalysis as a