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by David Rosenfeld, London, Karnac Books, 2006, 264 pp., £19.99 (paperback).
This book brings together eight chapters by David Rosenfeld originally published separately in collections concerning topics from child psychoanalysis to trauma and psychosis. These themes run through this book so that taken as a whole these previously separate chapters form a whole communicating Rosenfeld's ideas in such a way that repetition and revisititation of his concepts in relation to different cases make them feel familiar and understood.
The book has a Foreword by Thomas Ogden who expresses his regard for Rosenfeld's courageous work with psychotic patients. He himself chooses two of the chapters to discuss and goes on to describe them as representing – ‘two of the most important contributions of the past decade to the understanding of the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients’ (p. xvii).
While the book feels immediately modern (one subheading is ‘Sega versus Nintendo’), Rosenfeld traces the foundations of his work back to Freud and refers to subsequent seminal figures through the decades constantly weaving a theoretical framework from which he presents his captivating clinical material. Each of the first four chapters revolves around an individual patient and the exploration of their difficulties while attempting to generalize resultant hypotheses. The first chapter concerns a young man recovering from a psychotic episode in the context of earlier family trauma in Chile and subsequently in other South American countries when fleeing military dictatorship. Rosenfeld moves on to describe ‘Julie’ who has an eating disorder, ‘George’ with substance misuse problems and ‘Lorenzo’ and his addiction to video games.
It is Rosenfeld's own very personal explanation of his approach and the work that he undertakes with these patients in their late teens or early twenties that make the clinical material so moving. He says ‘Psychoanalysis, besides interpreting, tries to teach patients to b