Review of Evening Sessions with Dr. Priestly by Cathy Lobel (2007) Two Lights Press. Reviewed by Arlene Kramer Richards
www.EveningSessions.com Cathylobel@rcn.com
This small self published “testament to psychoanalysis” presents a narrative of the development of one woman’s psychoanalytic understanding of herself interlarded with a series of selections from religious texts on themes similar to those in the analytic narrative. Presenting biblical quotes on the left hand pages and analytic reveries on the right makes for something like a book of poetry in a bilingual edition. Except that the translations go in the opposite direction. The analytic episodes must have come before the translations into biblical terms in the author’s experience.
What happened in the analysis allowed the author to feel more authentically herself and to take good care of her inept and disabled mother. It also let her feel loved and loving. small changes in one sense, but huge changes in another. In that way it was like many other successful analyses, with specific symptom relief paired with a general change in attitude towards oneself and one’s place in the world.
Specific sessions as they are reported in the narrative could lend themselves to discussion of technique. For example, the analyst is reported to have told her patient that she had been burdened with the care of her baby brother at too young an age. When the patient said that she felt like a slave, the analyst told her that she had been a slave–too compliant. Was this supposed to help her see that she could have refused to do what her mother asked? How can a young child know that she will be allowed to refuse? The patient complained that she felt she was being accused of acting like a baby. Setting aside the question of whether her reporting was accurate, it would be worth discussing in a study group whether and how the patient’s statement that this childhood event took place could have been handled to maximal benefit in an analysis, and how it could be handled in therapy? Would there be a difference?
Another interesting discussion could center around the issue of the religious pictures that the therapist used to decorate her office. Would these lend authenticity, or would they impose the analyst’s wishes on the simple patient? Would they console or irritate? Would the self revelation of a religious analyst affect the patient’s freedom to imagine the analyst as like or unlike herself? Such questions could lead to useful understandings of the theoretical issues in analytic technique.
I recommend this book to those teaching analytic technique, to students of psychoanalysis and even, perhaps, to prospective patients.