To the Dream: Review of Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice by Galit Atlas and Lewis Aron: Dramatic Dialog: Contemporary Clinical Practice, edited by Atlas, Galit and Aron, Lewis (2017), Routledge, London, 194 pages

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage,

Need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon

The day breaking for you.

Give birth again

To the dream.

–Maya Angelou (2015)

Galit Atlas and Lewis Aron’s recent volume, Dramatic Dialogue (2018) is that which it seeks to illuminate. Reviving a psychoanalytic tradition created by the formally maligned Sandor Ferenzci, the book illustrates and elaborates Ferenzci’s insistence on a willing suspension of time and space, so that the past unfolds in a present made anew. Thus the stage is set for empathic dialog that informs the future. Intentionally evoking the theatrical term, “Dramatic Dialogue,” Ferenczi hopes to conjure a situation separate from everyday life that is saturated with action and meaning. In this drama, however, there is no script, but a form of improvisation that Philip Bromberg (2000) would call the “sweaty mess” (p. 27) of analytic engagement. Indeed, Atlas and Aron challenge any notion of clinical procedure or linearity—the before/after, inside/outside—both in the book’s content and its structure. Their writing itself breaks the “fourth wall,” so that the barrier separating the authors and the reader dissolves. As early as the second chapter, for instance, Atlas and Aron let us in on their anticipation as they write, wondering how we are receiving their prose, and at

the same time knowing that for us, in the present, this future will for them be long past.