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This book is about one patient and Joy Schaverien's work with him. The analysis (I prefer the word for this work, although the author refers to it as psychotherapy) began a few weeks before the patient was diagnosed, aged 47, with a fatal and fast moving cancer. It ended two years later with his death.
I read it at a time when I was revisiting family losses in the past and experiencing a family bereavement. Although this added to the significance and helpfulness of what I was reading, I don't doubt that, had this not been so, I would have found the book extremely moving. On my reading, Joy Schaverien has risked having her heart and perhaps her soul also, as well as her technique and intellect, open for scrutiny in a way that is both brave and inspiring. It brought to mind Joyce McDougall's presentation at the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) a few years ago (and the case is referred to by the author in this book) of her work with a dying patient for whom Joyce McDougall had adapted the analytic frame. I remembered criticism of her from the analytic audience, but I also remembered Donald Meltzer saying, ‘Joyce, you strewed her way with flowers’ (in a tone whose meaning was somewhat ambiguous). The words suggested Gertrude as she strewed Ophelia's grave, lamenting that she had thought to strew her marriage bed. They seemed to me to refer to the role of a loving witness who accompanies the initiate on their path towards marriage, or towards death. The image itself is ambiguous. It is resonant of the tension between life and death, and also, in its evocation of the archetypal mother, the tension between love and hate, the erotic and the envious and destructive.
In her book, Joy Schaverien seems ready to grapple with these tensions, and nowhere are they more apparent than in the detailed account of the erotic transference and countertransference. ‘James’ is a charming and youthful, although deeply unhappy and even suicidal man. Divorced, he has three almost grown chi