An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, by Dawn Skorczewski,  Routledge, New York, 2012,  268 pp.

In her new book, An Accident of Hope: The Therapy Tapes of Anne Sexton, Dawn Skorczewski offers a reading of Anne Sexton as revealed through the therapy tapes that chronicle her interactions with her therapist, Martin Orne. These tapes had been made because Sexton found it difficult to remember what had occurred in the sessions, and so she listened to and transcribed the tapes between sessions as an aid to her memory. They originally had been released to biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook. In listening to the tapes, Skorczewski hoped to better understand the relationships between Sexton's therapy, her poetry, and the cultural climate in which they were embedded.

I approached this volume with great relish, looking forward to obtaining greater insight into the heart and mind of Anne Sexton through consideration of these therapy tapes left behind after her death. And indeed, Skorczewski is a skilled writer whose rendering of Anne Sexton's poetry is inviting. I was disappointed, however, by what seemed to be a critique of the therapy itself and the theory inferred from the therapy process by someone whose literary sensibilities seem more finely attuned than her psychoanalytic understanding. Skorczewski privileges a somewhat simplistic notion of relational psychoanalysis, which she confounds with an overarching “contemporary theory.” The author presumes a straightforward linear progression in psychoanalytic thinking and conflates time sequence with progress, failing to situate