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Ellen Pinsky’s gem of a book, a collection of finely wrought, poignant, sometimes angry essays, is unusually beautiful, and yet it leaves us with disturbing discomfort. Pinsky demands that we acknowledge the analyst’s mortality – especially his actual death and also his fallibility, and the powerful effect this has on his patients. The book proceeds, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ (1981) so-named novella, as a “chronicle of a death foretold”. It is Pinsky’s experience of the death of her analyst that impels her writing. This death is declared at the beginning, specifically and with full humanizing detail, thus establishing an arc of tension, a disturbance, which must be borne by the reader for the entirety of the narrative. I think some of the book’s considerable power comes from this: despite stating at the outset that her analyst’s death forms the basis of her writing, despite interleaving the investigation of scant considerations of analysts’ mortality in our literature along with her personal experience of this event from all corners of the essays, the reader is nevertheless startled by the epilogue’s recounting of the tender words of affection she offered him as he was leaving for a conference: “[h]ave a good time, learn something, and
cross the street very carefully” (p. 121), his sudden collapse, and thus the abruptness of this painful and peculiar loss.
The reader’s experience – of shock, sadness, a voyeuristic taking in of the particularities of the event of this patient’s experience of this analyst’s death – enacts one of the main points of the book. Despite the uniqueness of the analyst’s role for the patient, the analyst must also be acknowledged in his ordinariness, his flesh and blood humanness with all its frailty. Alongside the transference and the as-if-ness of the analytic endeavor, the patient’s experience of the analyst is, also, peculiarly real, intimate, her loss of him a human loss, its punch as shocking in its concreteness and finality as th