A Review of Doris Brothers's “Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis”

I cannot imagine a better way to talk about trauma [Patient of the reviewer after reading Dr. Brothers's 2008 book].

Towards a Psychology of Uncertainty: Trauma-Centered Psychoanalysis (Brothers, 2008) is a tour de force of the experiential landscape of trauma that is conceptually and clinically compelling. The third in a series (Ulman and Brothers, 1988; Brothers, 1995) by an author who has devoted her psychoanalytic life to the investigation and healing of traumatic suffering, this book is deceptively complex. It has what I might call dialogic depth. My numerous readings of the text have been an exciting voyage of discovery, whereby each reading takes me to new places,

yielding yet one more narrative thread of wisdom woven into its fabric. More important, Brothers does not teach from up high. She invites the reader into conversation, to join with her in her relentless and reverent inquiry into the mysteries of the human condition, where creative innovations are hard-won products that emerge out of her moving and often painful struggles in the psychoanalytic space.

I begin with the title. Book titles are often either mundane or even pretentious, promising much, but delivering much less. However, the title of this book is well-chosen and worthy of reflection and commentary, capturing as it does the creative heart of the text. The first half of the title, Toward a Psychology of Uncertainty, suggests a movement, a directional impetus to a destination not yet reached. Yet, in the first chapter, Brothers provides a comprehensive explication of the accumulating contributions of contemporary psychoanalytic thinkers, especially those informed by a philosophical or a relational systems sensibility, which have demonstrated the irrevocable fact of the irreducible uncertainty of psychological life and the theories that attempt to capture that life.

However, this taken-for-granted uncertainty is merely the takeoff point for Brothers's inquiry—one that focuses not on the fact of