This book is in many ways an unusual one. It is essentially a collaborative effort between a treating analyst, Donald Marcus, and his pseudonymous patient, Hope, also an analyst. The two coauthors describe and mutually comment on a four-year analysis that followed an exceptional path toward what both participants consider was, for each of them, a highly successful outcome.

To a psychoanalyst trained in the “classical” tradition and largely guided by its precepts in his practice, reading this volume resembled the experience of an anthropologist doing fieldwork in an exotic culture. Marcus, clearly a serious, thoughtful, and devoted analyst, appears to have evolved a theoretical and technical approach derived in large measure from his own experience of a 10-year Kleinian analysis and clinical supervision by Wilfred Bion. His ultimate orientation, then, is clearly an interpersonal and intersubjective one, in which all attention is given to