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Steven Poser's The Misfit, which traces Marilyn Monroe's attempt to heal, through psychoanalysis, the wounds she suffered in her starkly depriving childhood, affords us a rare look at an unusual dyad, a psychoanalytic couple, not generally portrayed as such outside of the sequestered confines of the consulting room. Poser, who is both psychoanalyst and painter, has written on a topic that would seem to be perfectly in his wheelhouse. His artistic sensibility and his ready grasp of the psychodynamics of the case come together in a beautifully rendered account of the ideals and tragic missteps of two highly intelligent, charismatic and talented protagonists.
The reader is confronted with the analyst's predicament when faced with a patient without a cohesive self, who, having suffered a disabling and fragmenting loss of security and self-esteem in her formative years, was desperately in need of care and emotionally unable to function independently; a patient, however, who, despite these deficits (and perhaps in part also because of them), electrified the culture of her day with her