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The power of Paul Williams's Invasive Objects: Minds Under Siege takes the reader by surprise. Williams's subject - the psychoanalytic (and/or psychoanalytically
informed) treatment of patients with psychotic disturbances - has been addressed by many contributors. But Williams brings together a disciplined and empathic clinical voice, a sophisticated level of conceptualization, and a wide-ranging knowledge and intelligence that place this work in a broader social, cultural, political, historical, and intellectual context. In the end, the book leaves the reader with a sense that this kind of work is not just the province of the gifted few working in extraordinary situations, but, rather, requires a skill that can be mastered with perseverance and dedication, can be plausibly carried out in the real world, and is one of the more beneficial and humane uses to which psychoanalytic knowledge may be put.
The book is divided into two sections of six chapters each, ‘Clinical Chapters’ and ‘Applied Chapters’, though this distinction is somewhat misleading. Many of the chapters have been previously published elsewhere, sometimes as chapters in other books, and they are intended for varying audiences and written in different styles. For example, although four of the six clinical chapters address points of psychoanalytic theory drawn from skillfully executed and carefully observed clinical work, the fifth is an introductory overview of clinical principles of the psychoanalytic treatment of ‘Cluster A’ personality disorders by diagnosis, originally written for Clarkin, Gabbard and Fonagy's (2010) Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Personality Disorders: A Clinical Handbook, and the last is an essay about the illness and recovery of John Nash as depicted in the biography A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (1998) and the 2001 film of the same name, contemplating from a psychoanalytic point of view Nash's remarkable and exquisitely well-documented clinical course, and its clinical impl