Entering Night Country

Psychoanalysis is a voyage through paradoxical, transitional space, real and unreal, personal and professional, serious and playful, hyper-real and make believe, exhilarating and mournful. In this extraordinarily well-written and deeply moving book, Stephanie Brody guides the reader on a feelingful and evocative journey through liminal psychoanalytic space searching for the pearls of change and meaning and pausing long enough to take in the poignancy of each existential moment of vulnerability and loss. - Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis This is an unusual and deeply rewarding book. Although psychoanalysis was, in a sense, founded on myth (Oedipus) and on narratives (free association) Stephanie Brody takes us on a new, deep and intense voyage through many mythic narratives. This is not tourism. It is more like battle, ordeal, service to ideals of care, and witnessing. This is an exquisitely written book. It is a pleasure to read and so to encounter with grace and kindness the hard stories of our clinical work. As in the stories in classical myth, a clinical journey is full of trap doors, knives, cuts, battles, and ordeals of loss and suffering. The analyst must risk deep disruption along with, though also differently from, the analysand. We need more writing like Brody's. We need to be able to speak to others in our field about the demands of this work and above all of its unpredictability. This would be part of our individual self-care as healers. This book also calls out to our field, as a group, to be better able to hold the complexity of the analyst's state. - Adrienne Harris, New York University This beautifully written book offers a highly personal account of the experience of being a psychoanalyst, deeply committed to confronting death, separation, and the intrinsic impermanence of life. The author illuminates her multifaceted thesis with a myriad of thoughts and images drawn from classical and modern literature and with brilliantly vivid, succinct vignettes from her clinical experience. Entering Night Country invites readers to share the author's reflections and to extend them with their own. A marvelous read. - Anton O. Kris, MD, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Professor of Psychiatry, part-time, Harvard Medical School.