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Psychoanalysis is certainly beginning to welcome the stance of openness to mystery and, as Green (1998) proposes, working with the agony and ecstasy of emotional experience rather than eliminating it by logic. The Kabbalistic concepts and metaphors in Repair of the Soul are startling and deepen our receptivity to the unconscious of our patients and our own. Expanding our sense of purpose as we work with patients, this mystical tradition reminds us of the sacred aspect of our work in helping each patient find his or her authentic self, as well as the necessity of giving the message that recreation or re-birth is possible. With this can come our own rebirth.
Also, and not the least important, Repair of the Soul illuminates how we as psychoanalysts are in a long historical tradition of spiritual discourse, and many of our cherished concepts have been articulated many times before throughout history. This book can be thought of as a companion gently guiding us in our everyday work with patients as we play with what it means to transform and be transformed.
Starr's view is that the Kabbalist's formulation of man's relationship with God, both its asymmetry and its mutuality, articulates an aspect of experience that has eluded our grasp as psychoanalysts—the spiritual perspective of mutuality, those “ineffable aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter” (p. 114)—that help create something new. Her aim is to use Kabbalistic metaphors to inform our psychoanalytic understanding of psychic change, and she succeeds.
This book contains so many interesting, evocative concepts and possibilities that I cannot touch on all of them in this review. What follows is a summary of the highlights.
The many compelling parallels between psychoanalysis and Kabbalistic thought encourage a poetic reflection on our own process. For example,