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I must admit to having approached my task of reviewing Sophia Richman[#x02019]s Mended by the Muse with some apprehension. Reviewing the table of contents before sitting down to read, I was confronted with the stories of holocaust survivors, the Chilean disappeared, survivors of political torture and imprisonment, the chronically ill, the terminally ill, and those otherwise aging individuals facing the inevitable end of their own (our own) lives. I took a deep breath, anticipating that I was soon to be plunged into the darkest and most desperate depths of human despair: the miasma of alternating hopelessness, raging protest, and psychic fragmentation that so often marks the perilous journey we undertake with our most traumatized patients. Of course we enter and exit these places hourly in the course of our clinical work. My own clinical work has focused largely on adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and so I know this landscape of psychic devastation from the inside out and the outside in. But this was my Christmas[#x0002F]New Year break and my resistance was palpable, my manic defenses securely in place. I took a deep breath and began to read.
As I entered Richman[#x02019]s world, however, I soon became aware that my body was beginning to relax. The surprise was visceral. This was most clearly not what I had anticipated. Although I was, indeed, plunged into the most desperate recesses of the human heart of darkness, I encountered not only psychic death and resignation but that which makes us most essentially alive and most essentially human. I encountered the incandescent spark of personal human creativity[#x02014]the first fire, the cave art of primitive tribes, magnificent symphonies, extraordinary literature, the exploration of space, scientific and medical discovery that challenges our minds to heal, ourselves and others. Here, in Richman[#x02019]s pages, in
the shadow of the Holocaust and other unthinkable man-made horrors was the undeniable and awe-i