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Through illuminating stories, With Culture in Mind explores clinical moments in which therapist and client encounter the powerful effects of the psychic and the social, of an individual's inner and outer worlds. Each of the 18 stories in this book is introduced by editor Muriel Dimen and then commented upon, in groups of six, by Jessica Benjamin, Susie Orbach, or Andrew Samuels. Despite, or maybe because of, the presence of so many stories and reflections, this collection could not be considered a light or easy read. It is full of big ideas, big theories, and big words to match: interpellation, resignification, intelligibility. This is also not a book to simply read and put down in a single pass. Like a rich Talmudic text, its strength lies in its form, inviting commentary upon commentary and the opportunity to elaborate, clarify, and deepen the discussion over time.
The book emerged from the work of a psychoanalytic writing group whose members then presented their papers at various conferences. While it is loosely divided into three parts with slightly different themes, the groupings appear mostly to derive from clusters of papers that appeared together at those conferences. Taken together, the stories reflect a range of voices and writing styles and concern themselves with diverse aspects of the sociopolitical world.
Part I's theme concerns the social third, in which the powerful and often unseen presence of culture constitutes an additional or third influence on the dynamics and understandings of therapist and client. Themes include societal beliefs about motherhood, gay marriage, war, illness and healing, collective cultural fantasies, race and racism. We meet Melissa, “lost in [the] fog” of society's binary and constraining definitions of motherhood and so unable to form a satisfying maternal identity until both therapist and client find their own maternal voices. Li-an, the product of her immigrant Vietnamese parents’ war and refugee wounds, searches for a way t