Awakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys

A WAKENING THE DREAMER: CLINICALJOURNEYS, Philip Bromberg's inspiring new collection of essays did put me in mind of a journey. The culmination of a unique process of transformation, it records the long, strange trip undertaken by psychoanalysis in the last decades. To read this book is to encounter through the lucid consciousness of one of our most reflective practioners and splendid writers the intense struggle to transform our field in a way that utilizes the authentic personal experience of the analyst. Among the many accomplishments of Bromberg's book is its embodiment of the parallel process of change in the discipline of psychoanalysis and in individuals, the former being dedicated to the latter. In this way Bromberg shines a retrospective light on our dark ages of unresolved enactments activated by the stance that psychoanalysis involves one healthy person curing one sick one, as Racker characterized it, while illuminating the way forward through the conscious use of enactments as an inevitable and necessary undertaking of rupture and repair. It is Bromberg's gift to write about this process of not always so graceful surrender to the inevitable in a way that goes beyond mere explanation, with a profundity and effortlessness that moves us to think, Maybe there is grace; maybe surrender is possible. And, if not grace, then certainly gratitude. Yet so trenchantly does he expose the roots of the inevitable in our constant tendency to dissociate and remove ourselves from the despair and urgency of human suffering that he never lets us forget what a costly struggle it really entails. To convey the personal meaning to me of this parallel process of transforming our work individually and collectively, let me say that, when I compare the current state of the art so vividly illuminated by Bromberg with that which prevailed when I entered training in 1980, I feel a sense of