Psychoanalytic Collisions by Joyce Anne Slochower Hillsdale, NJ:  Analytic Press 2006  182 p.

Joyce Slochower offers an exemplary integration of the personal, professional and clinical in this book. Organized by her central assumption of the ‘inevitability of collisions [between the desired and the actual] and our need to face, rather than sidestep, them without collapsing either our vision or our humanity’ (p. xvii), she applies this psychoanalytic sensibility to professional development and clinical work. Beginning with an emphasis on the facilitating role of protective illusion in psychic survival and emotional growth, she incorporates a complementary recognition of the catalytic potential of confrontation with irresolvable confl ict, and then applies both to various aspects of psychoanalytic identity and practice. Implicit in her Winnicottian understanding of the human need to employ illusion to defer overwhelming anxiety until it can be coped with is a salutary developmental perspective regarding illusion as a capacity that, while it can initially permit emotional growth, can subsequently interfere with it. Slochower's language for capturing important qualitative distinctions between illusions that enable or disable development, while not the intended focus of the book, is one of its many noteworthy contributions. Starting with a quite personal introduction, she sets a tone that continues throughout, weaving together the consulting room and the social milieu in which it is situated. Part I, ‘Personal/professional struggles,’ utilizes lively, succinct and candid clinical