Even as a child, when approaching a novel for the first time, I would thumb breathlessly to the last page to prepare myself emotionally for the painful experience of ending a good book. Then, and only then, could I turn back and begin “anew,” as if I were beginning beyond the ending, as if to deny the anticipated separation.

This is how I found myself approaching The Narration of Desire. On the last page, the authors define the analytic narration of desire as a mutual story-making process. This was all I needed to fuel my expectation that I might find in this book a confirmation of my own clinical experience: that analysts need to participate actively in the (re)construction of their patients' life experiences, particularly when dealing with severe psychopathology. To confirm my expectations yet again, I plunged into the clinical chapters on perverse narratives, where I found myself in the familiar desert terrain of preoedipal transference regressions. What was new and exciting was the elaborated focus on the authors' active involvement