The Analyst as Storyteller/El Analista Como Narrador ed by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau (review)

Reviewed by: The Analyst as Storyteller/El Analista Como Narrador ed by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau Jeffrey Berman (bio) The Analyst as Storyteller/El Analista Como Narrador, Edited by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau In what may be the first of its kind, Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau, a training and supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the chair of the International Psychoanalytic Association’s Cultural Committee, decided in 2020 to invite members and associates to participate in a short-story contest with the goal of publishing the 30 best stories. The result is The Analyst as Storyteller/El Analista Como Narrador (2021), a compilation of these tales appearing in both English and Spanish. Many analysts are drawn to fiction, Schmidt-Hellerau observes in the foreword, because it “fosters their capacity to immerse themselves in still inarticulate experience, some of which may seem of minor importance yet already carry the heart of the matter at stake” (p. ix). Interestingly, the “heart of the matter,” as Sander Gilman et al. (1994) observe in Reading Freud’s Reading, is the “line which Sigmund Freud scribbled in the margin of a number of his books when he found what seemed to him the essence of a text and its author” (p. xiii). It is no surprise that Schmidt-Hellerau has edited a volume of fiction, for she herself is a creative writer, the author of Memory’s Eyes: A New York Oedipus Novel (1920). The response to the invitation, Schmidt-Hellerau remarks, exceeded her expectations. She and the ten judges, all psychoanalysts, received submissions from 252 analysts from the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and India. The analysts range in age from young, still involved in psychoanalytic training, to elderly and in retirement. Ten of the authors are male, the remaining female. The stories are indeed short, ranging in length from under three pages to seven. Narrowing the selection to the [End Page 607] best 30 must have been daunting, but the result is a treasure trove. I found the tales intriguing, and it was difficult to limit myself to discussing a handful. Tellingly, few of the stories are about psychoanalysis. An unhappy character in the Brazilian analyst Vera Lamanno-Adamo’s story, “The Woman on the Second Floor,” living in “eternal grief and bitterness,” is asked whether she has been to therapy. “No way. I know myself better than anybody else” (p. 216). All she wants to do is obliterate consciousness. Her only delight is the little bag of poison, “the messenger of revenge,” that she keeps near her, recalling Nietzsche’s wry observation that the thought of suicide is a great consolation; it helps one get through many a bad night. In “The Underside,” written by the Brazilian analyst Carolina Scoz, a man has spent years in analysis, but the experience, as we shall see, has only made him more judgmental. The Chilean analyst Nicholás Correa Hidalgo’s story, “The Keys,” focuses on a teacher of psychoanalysis who is on his way to speak to his students about Freud, but we don’t hear what he will say. Apart from these brief references, there is nothing about the talking cure. Why? We can only speculate. Perhaps the analyst-authors do not want to write about what they do for a living. Perhaps they believe it is unethical to write about psychoanalytic patients, real or fictional. Perhaps they seek an escape from their work and wish to write about experiences that occur outside of their office. Or perhaps they believe that writing fiction enables them to express truths that are otherwise inexpressible. Ironically, many creative writers—novelists, playwrights, poets, and memoirists—have written about psychoanalysis, as I discussed in The Talking Cure (1985), but psychoanalytic authors rarely use fiction to write about their own profession. Upon closer analysis, however, the stories mix memory and desire, the domain of psychoanalysis. Nearly all probe their characters’ inner lives, the world unseen by others, and they juxtapose past and present, demonstrating that our imagination is seldom limited by time or space. Some of the entries are phantasmagorical, revealing a character’s dreams, which represent a royal road not only...