You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Absolute Truth and Unbearable Psychic Pain: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Concrete Experience is the fifth installment of the CIPS Book Series on the Boundaries of Psychoanalysis. It is a wonderfully thoughtful and inherently useful book comprised of an introduction by Allan Frosch followed by eight chapters from contributors representing various diagnostic and clinical approaches to the problem of “concreteness” in analytic work. Concreteness here is understood as a state of mind that excludes the possibility of symbolization and, therefore, the consideration of alternative ways of knowing. There is an unwavering insistence on “absolute truth,” a rigidified certainty in terms of internal and external life.
Frederic Perlman, as series editor, does an excellent job of introducing the book in the preface. He makes the crucial observation that despite their theoretical diversity, all the contributors to this volume are talking about a general “fixity of the patient's representational world” (p. xv), where there is little or no complexity allowed.
Implicitly, the question posed in each of the book's chapters is how does the analyst help loosen this “fixity” and get the patient to “move”? Notwithstanding the compelling and varied theoretical underpinnings in this volume, its richness lies in its overall optimism regarding work with these seemingly intractable patients and in the wonderful clinical vignettes that support such confidence. The clinical material highlights how fixed meanings are