Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice. By Henry Markman. New York:  Routledge, 2022.  264 pp.

To step deep into the shed, to devote oneself to serious study and practice, is to come face to face with two things – the imposing magnitude of one’s art and the sometimes nearly daunting details of one’s own limitations.

How do we inhabit within ourselves our very unique way of being an analyst, while also pursuing the analytic project of care for another?

Think of Henry Markman’s offering as a musical album with thirteen tracks, and when you read/listen along, you will find this metaphor is no stretch. For one thing, Markman writes explicitly about music as metaphor, jazz in particular, as he elaborates distinct forms of psychoanalytic accompaniment and improvisation in clinical practice. He even goes so far as to recommend for the reader specific pieces of music that illustrate distinct ways a drummer accompanies the soloist. For example, the palpable and energetic presence of Elvin Jones on drums provides John Coltrane with non-impinging “steady rhythmic support”—a pulse—that is “both strong and relaxed” on Coltrane’s Impressions (p. 1273). If you find it on your preferred music platform and listen along, you can hear and feel what Markman means. As someone not at all musically versed, I found this and the book as a whole to

be a highly engaging and illuminating work that sheds light while validating the variability in my own ways of being with patients.

Like a good album, you experience continuities and discontinuities in Markman’s creative work. Repeating patterns in his ideas, language, personhood, and guiding sensibilities—the stuff that infuses his analytic approach—become increasingly familiar