Appreciating and Arguing With Some Wonderful Teachers: Review of Danielian and Gianotti's “Listening With Purpose: Entry Points Into Shame and Narcissistic Vulnerability”

I loved my days as a student. Some teachers loved my feisty and inquisitive style, and some were discomfited. I learned often by expanding on and exploring my points of agreement with my teachers, and equally by exploring points of disagreement. In the spirit of this book (Danielian and Gianotti, 2012), which includes many conversations between Danielian and Gianotti and their students, my review is written as a one-sided “conversation” with the authors, in the form of questions, comments, and arguments I would raise with them were I lucky enough to have been in one of the supervision groups they describe in their book:

1. I start with a question that is foundational to your project: Are Karen Horney's ideas worth reviving?

Your book makes a convincing case. Although much of what you wish to teach does not require knowledge of, or attraction to, Horney's particular way of making sense of the dynamics of shame and narcissistic vulnerabilities and defenses, you have developed a basic scheme built on Horney's theories that can serve well as a teaching tool. I can well imagine that this book is not only a useful guide for newer clinicians, but also a guide for teachers and supervisors who seek ways to introduce clinicians to the subtleties of working with the immediate process of therapeutic conversation.

In some ways, this book calls to mind my graduate school days, when psychoanalytic thinking included the study of character styles. Remember that notion? That idea fell out of vogue, in no small part because the notion of character style came to be used reductively (and became corrupted by the reductive nomenclature, “disorder,” used in various Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders volumes). But, there is something to be said for developing a complex and nuanced appreciation of how so many facets of our embodied emotional style are emergent from the interplay our various vulnerabilities and adaptive adjustments. I have noticed that analytic candidates a