New Books in Psychoanalysis

As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love. So, I admit to having read a few, but only a few, well maybe more than a few books like this, books that are psychoanalytically informed yet meant for a popular audience. In fact I credit one of them, Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, for edging me towards the study of psychoanalysis. (Yes she is the mother of the author Ben Lerner btw, a fact I love.) As a kind of preview to Atlas’ book, I want to share a little about how I read for NBiP interviews as on reading this book, my usual mode slipped away. I think that reveals something essential about Come Closer. As an interviewer who speaks almost exclusively to authors of psychoanalytic books, I tend to read what populates my chosen queue tuned into a writer’s lineages. I am curious to see how the author situates themselves within the field’s family tree. As an analyst who interviews, I also read hoping to find some help, like what to do with the fact that yesterday serious psychic quicksand started to seep its seep into my consulting room and I am scared. Can you, dear author, can you keep me from being pulled under? Between a book’s covers I look for whether the author’s hand is grabbing mine, are our eyes meeting, do we share a wink, a nod, or get a leg up? And when a piece of psychoanalytic writing gives forth the new or the unexpected, like Dianne Elise, like Avgi Saketopolou? I live for it. I am sometimes a demanding reader and my “process” is quasi-athletic, certainly physical: as a child I slumbered with novels that tumbled from my hands to collapse on my chest as I lost consciousness. I have spent the night together with many an NBiP author whose book ended up under my pillow crooking my neck. I carried many of you on every train line. You gave me tennis elbow. I read you before the lights go out at the cinema and again as the curtain comes up, taking notes in the margins that I often cannot read three days later. I highlight. I underline. I fold pages in half, leave exclamation points, write the words ‘yes’ or ‘no’ emphatically and if I don’t have a pen? I swipe the lipstick off my lips touching a page so as to denote my interest, positive or negative. All my NBIP books come to resemble well loved rag dolls: they probably even smell like me. So how to understand that when I read Galit Atlas’ Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, my pen lay fallow? I can say this: the book got a hold of me, and then once I was in it I got lost, so my hands they but held the book and nothing more, and they held it closely. Come Closer was telling me about myself. It has the quality of a beach read, which is rare in our field for sure, and often such an assignation is meant as an insult, but it is the kind of book that you can put down precisely because you are so into it. And because you are hooked you put that sunscreen on your companion’s back and then run to the sea realizing you are overheated, maybe need to pee, get a coffee, call for a dinner reservation and when you come back to it, it’s as if you had never left, forget that you touched a body with lotion and tended to your own. Like an engrossing film where after you exit the cinema you see its visual remnants everywhere, like a friendly hallucination, this book’s world remains with you. You cannot not find in yourself aspects of Atlas’ taxonomy: the guilty child who learns to lie, the melancholic child who won’t let go, the invisible child who sees it all, the frightened child who needs no explanation, the ashamed child who seeks perfection, and the chosen child who perhaps takes the hardest hit. Freud said, in paraphrase, that our thoughts cannot but turn to work and love. Who among us doesn’t see the remnants of our early lives in the strange debris and the funny shapes our love lives take? And who, in their secret heart of hearts, doesn’t want to read a book of stories, cases sure, but by a psychoanalyst who has prose that flows, psychoanalytic formulations secreted in, a book that almost masquerades as self help, but, in refusing easy answers, in sticking with the truth of the unconscious, seduces believers and unbelievers both: we cannot get away from early life and in our love lives we cannot pretend otherwise. Come Closer comes so close it can feel like a second skin.