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Standing in the spaces: essays on clinical process, trauma, and dissociation by Philip M. Bromberg. (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1998, 328 pp.)
THERE ARE FEW WRITERS I ENJOY READING AS MUCH AS I DO PHILIP Bromberg—or who teach me as much in the process. Like Harry Stack Sullivan, he has so mastered the brief, ironic, clinical narrative that the characters he brings to life stay in our minds as indelibly as did some of Sullivan's or Freud's. Further, his own personal engagements with us, those jokes with their sharp clinical edges, for example, continue to make their teaching points long after we have put the book down. I find myself repeatedly quoting his story about the man who smoked his own penis (p. 178), or the definitions he passes along for hysteria (“Someone who goes through life pretending to be who he really is” and “An hysteric is like a glass of water without the glass,” p. 223), along with his view of a self psychologist, unfair though it may be, as “an interpersonal analyst who is deaf in one ear” (p. 158).
I have for a while been grappling with Bromberg's view of dissociation and trying to sort out how to inhabit it without losing my self in the process. I am sure he is right about the experience of trying to “feel like one self while being many” (p. 12), as he is about the shard-like character of life itself. I particularly admire the ways he finds to describe this process without politicizing the discourse.