Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis, Edited by Adrienne Harris, Margery Kalb, and Susan Klebanoff,  Routledge, London, 2016,  212 pp. $39.95.

This compact, edited monograph of 9 chapters holds within its loose leaf jacket the capacity to refine the clinical practice of anyone from the novice to the seasoned practitioner.

Expanding upon her rediscovery of the work of J. H. (Henri) Rey (1988), who conceptualized how every analysis is an implicit attempt to cure one's family member(s), (or, theoretically, one's damaged internal objects), Harris (2018) contends that multigenerational trauma and mourning may leave ghostly presences that are difficult for clinicians to fully grasp and thereby help the patient to put to rest. Through their immersion in a study group that began with the papers of Sam Gerson (who provides a stellar, synthesizing afterward to their book) and extending to other historical and contemporary contributors, Harris, Kalb, and Klebanoff also “found ghosts haunting our theories, our practices, and our training institutes (p. 1)” to the patient's and the practitioner's jeopardy.

Therapeutic impasse, uncanny experiences, somatic illness, unusual sensorimotor sensitivities, and postural anomalies and dystonias are just a few of the manifold ways that these disavowed, disorderly spectral