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The Authority of Tenderness: Dignity and the True Self is the third in Paul Williams' remarkable trilogy—following The Fifth Principle (Williams, 2010a) and Scum (Williams, 2014a)—writings that are not easily labeled. While compelling as texts written by a psychoanalyst, they are not psychoanalytic books as such. Although each is a deeply personal expression of battered and profoundly struggling selves, they are not exactly memoirs or autobiographies. They are something else. Williams, in his preface to this third book, characterizes his intention in the first two volumes:
The author undertook, on behalf of the subject [Williams himself], to provide a faithful, intelligible rendering of unintelligible events. The mind in question, insofar as it resembles other minds, was given an opportunity to speak to the reader, which could not have happened in reality. … (Williams, 2022, p. xii)
Comprised of a mere 85 pages, it becomes quickly apparent that, in The Authority of Tenderness, there are no superfluous words or ideas. Rather, they give voice to psychic worlds that all too often have become unbearable and unspoken, within both families of origin and our professional communities, such that being “Gone” becomes the only option for psychic survival:
Who cares anyway? The Gone child walks, turns up, leaves, goes ‘home’, day after day, week after week, doesn't it? What is there to say? (Williams, 2022, p. 43)
The chapters in this book shift among autobiography, discussions of the nature of solitude, accounts of the raw realities of minds destroyed by neglect and violence, clinical stories, and descriptions of “the authority of tenderness” in the treatment of severe psychic distress and disintegration. The chapters are not presented in any obviously linear sequence. In fact, I found myself initially taken aback by the structure of the book. But with repeated readings, I found that Williams' chapter sequencing served as a reminder of the realities of the shifting nature of a p