Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being

In a series of overlapping clinical essays—sometimes highly personal, sometimes bristling with theory, sometimes employing experimental writing—Jade McGleughlin upends the ways we tell a psychoanalytic story.

Tracing the evolution of her thinking, the collection grapples with the problem of engaging patients when verbal representation fails. To do this, McGleughlin takes us inside some of her richest, most surprising encounters with patients who have suffered severe trauma, leading to a breach in the experience of self. McGleughlin imagines how to meet patients in the breach. She then brings us along, requiring the analyst's intense personal struggle to find and share the patients' experiences of liminality, of terror, of non-existence—to tolerate the vertigo of deep engagement with the other. Rather than leading with authority and the illusion of an autonomous self, McGleughlin offers storytelling that mirrors the work; her enactive writing dares to replicate the unsettling experience of the breach and invites readers to experience not only seeing but being seen.

Drawing from film, literature, and art, including her own paintings, as well as extensive clinical experience, this book is essential reading for all psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and anyone wanting to understand how communication in a clinical space can transcend the verbal.