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Cancer evokes a morbid fascination, dread, and anxiety in the patient, the family, and the therapist. This is a book in which art, theory, and clinical practice are so expertly blended that a creative report emerges. The intermixing of mourning theory, clinical narrative, and a profound understanding of the interaction
among patient and family and psychotherapist with artistic and literary illustrations gives us a framework that unifies these various dimensions into a completely coherent document.
The author, Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, Ph.D., ATR, is an art therapist, a candidate at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, a specialist in working with cancer patients, and the author of many scientific works that deal with her area of expertise and other allied fields. As I have indicated, her book, although entitled Cancer Stories, is more than a series of clinical narratives. While she deals in concepts derived from psychoanalysis, each section has a specific focus, and her data are derived from her own direct experience, reports in the literature of the field, fictional accounts such as Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Illich, biographies and autobiographies, and sequential visual artistic productions by well-known and established artists, for example, the Swiss painter Ferdinand Hodler. Dreifuss-Kattan, in sensitive descriptions, with actual sequential presentations of the paintings of this well-known painter, illustrates the progression of the terminal illness of his mistress. This series of pictures, made between 1905 and 1915, graphically shows the transformation of a beautiful woman to a figure deteriorating and dying from breast cancer. “In over 50 oil paintings, 130 drawings, 200 sketches, and one piece of sculpture, Hodler illustrated how he perceived his lover…and how Hodler was able to live [through her]…slow dying and at the same time overcome it through his art” (p. 228).
The author does mention, however, that the artist previously had suffered many prolo