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Joyce Slochower's book is simultaneously (a) an original contribution to the psychoanalytic literature, (b) a source of clinical expertise and sophistication that is not to be missed, and (c) an antidote to the current faddish conception of D. W. Winnicott as the “warm and fuzzy” psychoanalyst. This is the voice of a psychoanalyst who prizes not knowing as much as knowing, and who repeatedly demonstrates a hard-won respect for and familiarity with the ubiquitous role of paradox, dilemma, and failure in clinical process. She “stays with” these experiences, both in her actual analytic work and in making room for them in her theorizing; the ideas that result are flexible but robust, and bear the unmistakable imprint of demanding serious and intense psychoanalytic work. Reading this book, I repeatedly pictured the author as someone superbly able to think on her feet, and equally able to tolerate being swept off her feet by the sheer force of clinical process.
Slochower grounds her conception of “holding” in Winnicott's theory and then proceeds to extend and enrich it by considering such contemporary issues as enactment, the fate of the analyst's subjectivity, the intersubjective nature of the analytic endeavor, and revised conceptions