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Steiner's latest offering includes a collection of papers published between 1996 and 2011, which are gathered together in this edition and organized around the themes of “seeing,” “being seen,” “retreat,” and emergence.” They provide a close, extensive and detailed examination of the experience of exposure by patients who “lose the protection of a pathological organization” (p. 3). This edition further explores and elaborates ideas presented in the author's previous book Psychic Retreats . The papers are organized into nine chapters that support and elaborate his emphasis on working to understand theoretically how “a failure to develop impedes the work of analysis [and] the recognition that we all need defenses to protect us from anxiety and pain” (p. 1). The volume's abundant clinical vignettes and extensive discussions center on the various manifestations of such treatment impasses as they relate to the experience of exposure, and the related need for protection in the form of retreat. This clinical material supports Steiner's thesis and serves to exemplify the abstract and theoretical aspects of his discussion. Steiner adds to the Kleinian literature by addressing “being seen in its many permutations.” In arguing that this aspect of experience is ignored by the Kleinians, he raises the implicit question regarding the unintentional provocation of suffering during the analytic encounter that the analyst needs to be sensitized to. I believe this level of sensitive observation and discussion and its direct relevance to clinical practice is the strong point of this book.
The chapters are grouped into several basic themes, including detailed attention to a wide range of emotional states that Steiner argues engender the need for retreat or that become activated during retreat emergences. He places emotional states along a continuum ranging