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We have to, I think, encompass a double reality: that we have much to offer our patients—and very little. (Slochower, 2024, p. 167)
Joyce Slochower places this line near the end of her latest volume, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, but it could just as well open the book. As a recent graduate of a five-year psychoanalytic training program at The National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP), I read it with a jolt of recognition. It captures the inner weather system of a beginning analyst with startling precision: the dizzying swing between sessions that feel inert, even pointless—and those that seem to hinge the entire treatment.
In her preface to the book, Nancy McWilliams calls Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken a “love letter to the next generation of analysts” (Slochower, 2024, p. xv). To me, it feels like a dog-eared guidebook, the kind you used to find in youth hostels in far-flung places before iPhones and Google Maps—a travel companion for the long, strange trip of becoming an analyst, some of its recommendations perhaps a little out of date but nevertheless passed from hand to hand because it still knows something you need. It tells you you’re not traveling alone—and that disorientation is part of the work, not a threat to it. The book’s usefulness is not in giving away the answers, it’s in not pretending to have them.