Moment of Insight: Vignettes from a Psychoanalytic Practice: By Sumner L. Shapiro, M.D. New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1976. 119 pp.

I cannot help admiring and even liking this neat little collection of stories about troubled patients. However, I can and should refrain from regarding these stories as representing actual psychoanalaytic work. Rather, they seem to be examples of analytic helpfulness, the outcome no doubt of the author's analytic training, but dependent particularly upon his kindness, patience, and restraint and upon his sensitivity to patients' hidden messages. And, although he tells us the cases are "fictionalized within the bounds of literary license," it is this reader's further opinion that Dr. Shapiro's dramatic ability and his talent for phrase-making have carried him beyond the limits of credibility.

In view of the frequency with which analysts come under fire for stilted writing, it is a pity that I should feel constrained to criticize Dr. Shapiro for being too dramatic. My only justification is that analysis simply is not dramatic in the sense conveyed in this book. Dramatic things not uncommonly do happen in patients' lives during analysis, often as the result of analysis, but to present such events as analysis is misleading. The real drama of analysis, its essence, consists of experiences that take place within the patient's own psychic functioning—experiences that are very private and known only to patient and analyst. Quiet, fleeting, and quickly fading, these experiences are remarkably hard to remember, let alone to describe with any verity to another person. So, as always,