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How do we account for the rebirth of a patient who has endured unspeakable horrors? How do hidden beliefs about God (or no-God) shape the psychoanalytic theories of our luminaries? These are questions that Marie Hoffman tackles in her book Toward Mutual Recognition. This dense treatment of the big questions is illustrated through Hoffman's 15-year therapy with a young woman called Mandy.
At age 5, Mandy was lying in bed with her father. He was touching her body. Mandy felt special, but sensed that something was not right. Suddenly, Mandy's mother entered the room. An argument erupted. In Mandy's recollection, it was over the bowl of soup her mother had been delivering to her father. Mandy slipped downstairs to watch cartoons. She heard a loud bang. Her father burst out of the bedroom, furious, shirtless, and bloodied. Then he attacked her. When Mandy came to, she discovered her mother, nine months pregnant, dying in a pool of blood. Her eyes were cut out, and her lips and tip of her nose bitten off. The now-dead baby had been carved out of her womb, mutilated in ghastly ways. “I felt totally, utterly helpless,” Mandy told Hoffman. At the sound of her father's footsteps, Mandy tried to hide. He caught her, plunged a screwdriver through her eye, and threw her across the room. Rescue teams arrived, but Mandy's life as she knew it was over. “Her torso and face were lacerated; she lost her eye, her mother, her almost born brother, her home and her father on the same day,” Hoffman writes (p. 41).
Mandy's percolating story of transformation emerges throughout Mutual Recognition. Hoffman sees their work together through the Christian lens of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Those “movements” are analogues to central ideas in relational psychoanalysis: identification, surrender, and gratitude (p. 17).
Hoffman sets out to illuminate this obscured bridge between Christianity and relational psychoanalysis. She wants to give Christianity its due. Christian narratives hav