Review from Gerald J. Gargiulo, Ph.D:
Freud advised and Theodor Reik expanded on the notion that to do psychoanalysis one has to listen more with one’s unconscious than one’s conscious mind. An analyst has to have the play of images relatively uncensored in order to hear the words a patient speaks. Sometimes, of course, words are spoken more in silence than with sound. Without feeling a patient’s pain, without, at times, being lost with them in emptiness, without remembering the injuries of one’s own life, an analyst can easily lose his or her way in the forest of diagnosis, in correct and accepted technical interventions and/or a standard understanding of the “frame.” Notwithstanding that such factors are normative for many analytic patients, they usually fall short when working with patients that have suffered significant trauma.
Dr. Raubolt’s short text is dedicated to working with such patients. While reading this text I was reminded of Bion’s description of psychoanalysis as one pained individual listening to another pained individual, meaning, I believe, that if we don’t suffer, in some profound way, with our patients we may hear them but we will not necessarily know them. In this collage of remembrances, impressions, memories and interventions, Dr. Raubolt evidences that he knows his patients. This is not a text proposing any new techniques or offering theoretical justifications for the interventions presented. It is a remarkably honest account of one analyst confronting varied pathologies in traumatized individuals and his attempt to help them. Each of the very short chapters just gives a synopsis of the issues and a description of his musings, his thoughts and sometimes his therapeutic reactions.
Psychoanalysis is too individualistic an enterprise for me to endorse all of Dr. Raubolt’s responses, nor is there any need for me to do so. This is a well-written, creative text, sensitive in its cameo descriptions and focused in portraying Dr. Raubolt’s desire, not always successful, to reach a patient. It is, because of all that, a text worth reading and pondering. I admire the honesty and candor of these short case presentations; I admire the willingness Dr. Raubolt shows in sharing with his colleagues how one he tries to hear and help his fellow human beings.
