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Beth Feldman’s (2025) new book, Case studies in relational psychotherapy and psychoanalysis: If I could turn back time, provides a valuable resource especially for both psychoanalytically inclined practitioners early in their careers, who want to know what happens in the consulting rooms of senior clinicians, and instructors who wish to use riveting clinical material to teach how to apply psychoanalytic theory to treatment in realistic and challenging clinical situations. Particularly noteworthy, via vivid and sometimes arresting self-disclosure, Feldman opens the office door and shares both the thrill of analytic victories and the agony of relational defeats—experiences that psychotherapists/psychoanalysts know well, but may be obscured by the tendency in peer groups, professional conferences, journal articles, and book chapters to celebrate analytic triumphs (and minimize treatment failures or challenges).
However, this book is neither about treatment failure (Goldberg, 2012; Kottler & Blau, 1989; Reppen & Schulman, 2018; Rosenfeld, 1989) nor premature termination (Barrett et al., 2008; Swift & Greenberg, 2012; Wallerstein, 1986). Instead, Feldman invites us into her subjective experience through exquisitely detailed descriptions of problematic lexical, prosodic, and nonverbal interaction sequences with a group of complex, if not “impossible,” patients (Duncan et al., 1997).
Here is but a sampling.
Claire: Friendless, isolated, abandoned by the infidelity of her husband, filled with self-loathing, a completed suicide, with whom Feldman admits having avoided conflict for fear of recapitulating her patient’s past, and possibly dredging up personal feelings too difficult to handle in the clinical moment.
Jen: Relentlessly obnoxious, bullying, rageful, judgmental, and condescending, with whom Feldman said she stuffed feelings of anger and minimized the extent to which her patient felt dependent upon their connection, though one defined by rageful attack and therapeutic su