This is Me, is that You? Encounters with Schizophrenia, By Steven Poser,  Yale University Press, 2025,  223 pp.

In the spring of 1994 Steven Poser was a psychoanalytic candidate. At the time, he counted his good fortune in having a hospital director who had been psychoanalytically trained, and supportive of Poser taking on the role of clinical intern at what was one of the last remaining 19th-century mental hospitals in New England. As such, Poser was given the opportunity to observe and engage with schizophrenic patients housed there and formed close therapeutic

relationships with those whom others might deem untreatable. Poser ended up spending two years there. In the prologue to his book, subtitled “Encounters With Schizophrenia,” he states his organizing principle:

I wanted to understand what was going on in their minds and, in accordance with a fundamental premise of psychoanalysis, I believed that the best way of doing that was to let the patient speak freely and at length, without imposing any preconceived agenda of my own. (pp. 1–2)

Poser's purity of contact with these patients shines forth as the center of his book. There are neither citations nor explications of psychoanalytic theory. Instead, the book is written in a more literary style, as he presents his impressions of these patients, all of them women, as human beings without any language of pathology. This uncluttered narrative landscape leaves large spaces for a clinician to view his contact with the patients through the vertices of their own theoretical orientations. Or, through no orientation at all.

Poser culled scribbled notes from his clinical diary written more than a quarter century ago as process notes for his supervisor (a disciple of Theodor Reik), and recreated his remembrances into this narrative. Divided into three sections, “Agnes,” “Mrs. Lutsky,” and “Lucia,” each section is a collection of encounters, no more than a page or two, predominantly relayed in dialogue. Sometimes the reader is made aware of how much time has passed between Poser's prior contact with Agnes, Mrs. Lutsky, or Lucia, but m