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The Rupture of Serenity is that breed of book that is rare in the psychoanalytic literature—a real page-turner. Abbasi has written a brave and powerfully
evocative volume that touches on issues relevant to all of us: how do we manage those moments when external events find their way into the consulting room and demand that we reckon with them—whether we want to or not? At times, Abbasi reminds us, life intrudes in spite of our most careful attention to the preservation of the analytic frame.
As I began to read, I was reminded of a presentation I heard in the earliest days of my training, in which the analyst described without irony how he had popped behind a potted palm in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel to avoid running into a patient. Abbasi, rather than darting into a dark doorway, meets these challenges head-on: “In the not-so-distant past,” she writes, “psychoanalysts liked to believe that we function in a kind of therapeutic cocoon” (p. xvi). Analysis was considered to unfold in hushed seclusion. Yet in reality, events in the analyst's life, whether writ large or small, can no more be banished from the consulting room than they truly can from the analyst's mind. Abbasi invites us to consider how we can think clearly and conceptually about these events and mine them for meaning in the service of deepening the analytic work.
In our fast-spinning world, there are few places where we can find serenity. Life can become a constant blur of motion, and our minds follow suit. In this cyber age, it seems that our attention is in constant demand. How quickly are we meant to respond to messages in our in-boxes? What can we do to relieve the feeling that we are moving faster and absorbing more than our minds can process?
We can no longer control how information comes to us, or how accessible information about us has become. Do we embrace it? Text and e-mail with patients, manage friend requests on Facebook, keep a Twitter account? Or do we duck behind a virtual potted palm an