Authenticity in the Psychoanalytic Encounter: The Work of Irma Brenman Pick: Edited by Irma Brenman Pick, M. Fakhry Davids, and Naomi Shavit. London & New York: Routledge, 2018. 250 pp.

Irma Brenman Pick has been known to say that the analyst must “hold the patient with two hands.” By this she means that in analysis, containment involves addressing, or “holding,” both the patient’s fragility and the patient’s destructiveness: listening for both, attending to both, and not losing track of one even when attending to the other. The capacity to express and face contrasting dimensions of ourselves, some of which may have long been in hiding, is what Brenman Pick means, it seems to me, by authenticity. Throughout this new volume of her collected papers, Brenman Pick invites us to see the inner workings of contradictory and hidden aspects of the patient’s psychical life and disposition as they play out in the analytic situation. She is masterful at recognizing the intricacies of internal object relations as they live both in the mind of the patient and in analysis where they vividly come to life in the interactions with the analyst. Throughout this book, one can feel her particular ways of apprehending the communications of her patients, picking them up through the countertransference, interpreting directly the patient’s unconscious communications, which both pronounce and enliven the heretofore hidden relationships between parts of the self and the self in relation to both internal and external objects. Irma Brenman Pick is a much-loved supervisor and consultant, who follows in the tradition of Melanie Klein, Wilfred Bion, and Herbert Rosenfeld. This book allows one to hear her at work and to follow closely her clinical logic while absorbing her ideas about development and technique in psychoanalysis.

The book’s fourteen chapters are divided into four separate sections: “Countertransference,” “Authenticity,” “Adolescence and

Sexuality,” and “Further Clinical Themes.” The editors, M. Fakrhy Davids and Naomi Shavit, have done an excellent job both at thematically arranging these papers and providing commentary in their introduction to each section. Irma