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This book provides us with 12 complex, nuanced accounts of struggles at once highly personal and involving all who work in this field. It is a collection of first-person accounts by psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians who write of their experiences with traumatic ruptures in analytic relationships and the ripplings outward of these in analytic institutions; I cannot recall anything like it in its directness. The death of an analyst, the loss of an analyst after the analyst's boundary violation of another patient, the loss of a patient to suicide —the authors speak into the silences that surround these and other traumatic ruptures in analytic relationships. Many of the papers centre on the experience of candidates in training, by authors reflecting back on their early-career experiences. I felt appreciation and—at times—awe for the authors' efforts to engage with and think about these deeply painful experiences.
Traumatic Ruptures is part of the Relational Perspectives Book Series, a series which originated under Stephen A. Mitchell's editorial overseeing and is now under the editorial supervision of Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris. The authors in this volume are largely from North America. The editor, Robin A. Deutsch, is a member and on the faculty of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
The book is divided into four parts, each taking up a different aspect of rupture. Part 1, ‘Ruptured Subjectivity, Lost and Found’, includes two papers. In the first, Adrienne Harris explores the question ‘What kind of analyst am I now?’ when her identity as an analyst is ruptured after her husband's sudden death and where ‘the central instrument of … her work is deeply charged with another more private task’ (p. 13). The personal tone of the first sentences introduces the tone of much of this book, ‘Everyone said, in one way or another, work will be good for you because work will be a distraction. Even at the beginning that did not seem right, in at least two directions. T