Psychoanalysis is a voyage through paradoxical, transitional space, real and unreal, personal and professional, serious and playful, hyper-real and make believe, exhilarating and mournful. In this extraordinarily well-written and deeply moving book, Stephanie Brody guides the reader on a feelingful and evocative journey through liminal psychoanalytic space searching for the pearls of change and meaning and pausing long enough to take in the poignancy of each existential moment of vulnerability and loss. - Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis
This is an unusual and deeply rewarding book. Although psychoanalysis was, in a sense, founded on myth (Oedipus) and on narratives (free association) Stephanie Brody takes us on a new, deep and intense voyage through many mythic narratives. This is not tourism. It is more like battle, ordeal, service to ideals of care, and witnessing.
This is an exquisitely written book. It is a pleasure to read and so to encounter with grace and kindness the hard stories of our clinical work. As in the stories in classical myth, a clinical journey is full of trap doors, knives, cuts, battles, and ordeals of loss and suffering. The analyst must risk deep disruption along with, though also differently from, the analysand.
We need more writing like Brody's. We need to be able to speak to others in our field about the demands of this work and above all of its unpredictability. This would be part of our individual self-care as healers. This book also calls out to our field, as a group, to be better able to hold the complexity of the analyst's state. - Adrienne Harris, New York University
This beautifully written book offers a highly personal account of the experience of being a psychoanalyst, deeply committed to confronting death, separation, and the intrinsic impermanence of life. The author illuminates her multifaceted thesis with a myriad of thoughts and images drawn from classical and modern literature and with brilliantly vivid, succinct vignettes from her clinical experience. Entering Night Country invites readers to share the author's reflections and to extend them with their own. A marvelous read. - Anton O. Kris, MD, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Professor of Psychiatry, part-time, Harvard Medical School.
In this creative and astute book, Stephanie Brody has constructed a work of art in itself. She offers readers the wisdom of classic and modern literature (opera included!) among which we find Homer, Neruda, Bellini, Bizet, Pullman and Lucretius. She extracts their words and applies them to the existential challenges of loss, illness, limit and mortality, all evidenced in everyday analytic work. If that were not enough, she does so with adept linguistic facility, metaphoric skill, poeticism, making the reading a delight despite persistent themes of death and other existential agonies
Andrea Celenza (2016) Revista di Psicoanalisi
Brody's marvelous book, Entering Night Country: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Loss and Resilience, with its poetic writing, its breadth of knowledge, and depth of feeling addresses the analyst's experience of coming face to face with the awareness of life's limitations - of vulnerability, alienation, loss and death ..... With elegance, grace and the fortitude to face her own mortality, Brody addresses the most essential topics of the psychoanalytic endeavor: the desire to heal and the elements that can thwart us, the inherent limitations in every clinical encounter, the grief and mourning that lie within each of us, and the inevitability of loss .... Every psychoanalyst should wander through the dark crevices, the shadowy corners, and the light-filled spaces that are revealed within the pages of Entering Night Country.
....Ultimately, Brody's book is about how analyst and patient together begin to genuinely grapple with the reality of their mortality. Brody's book is a remarkable exploration of the liminal spaces between the known and the almost-known aspects of the mind, between the patient and the analyst, between language and symbol, between spoken and unspoken, and ultimately, between life and death. The beauty of her writing, the scope of her knowledge, the wisdom, empathy and awareness that this volume contains, are stunning.
Anne Adelman (2019) The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88:1, 212-219
Psychoanalysis is a voyage through paradoxical, transitional space, real and unreal, personal and professional, serious and playful, hyper-real and make believe, exhilarating and mournful. In this extraordinarily well-written and deeply moving book, Stephanie Brody guides the reader on a feelingful and evocative journey through liminal psychoanalytic space searching for the pearls of change and meaning and pausing long enough to take in the poignancy of each existential moment of vulnerability and loss. - Lewis Aron, Ph.D. is director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis
This is an unusual and deeply rewarding book. Although psychoanalysis was, in a sense, founded on myth (Oedipus) and on narratives (free association) Stephanie Brody takes us on a new, deep and intense voyage through many mythic narratives. This is not tourism. It is more like battle, ordeal, service to ideals of care, and witnessing.
This is an exquisitely written book. It is a pleasure to read and so to encounter with grace and kindness the hard stories of our clinical work. As in the stories in classical myth, a clinical journey is full of trap doors, knives, cuts, battles, and ordeals of loss and suffering. The analyst must risk deep disruption along with, though also differently from, the analysand.
We need more writing like Brody's. We need to be able to speak to others in our field about the demands of this work and above all of its unpredictability. This would be part of our individual self-care as healers. This book also calls out to our field, as a group, to be better able to hold the complexity of the analyst's state. - Adrienne Harris, New York University
This beautifully written book offers a highly personal account of the experience of being a psychoanalyst, deeply committed to confronting death, separation, and the intrinsic impermanence of life. The author illuminates her multifaceted thesis with a myriad of thoughts and images drawn from classical and modern literature and with brilliantly vivid, succinct vignettes from her clinical experience. Entering Night Country invites readers to share the author's reflections and to extend them with their own. A marvelous read. - Anton O. Kris, MD, Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and Professor of Psychiatry, part-time, Harvard Medical School.
In this creative and astute book, Stephanie Brody has constructed a work of art in itself. She offers readers the wisdom of classic and modern literature (opera included!) among which we find Homer, Neruda, Bellini, Bizet, Pullman and Lucretius. She extracts their words and applies them to the existential challenges of loss, illness, limit and mortality, all evidenced in everyday analytic work. If that were not enough, she does so with adept linguistic facility, metaphoric skill, poeticism, making the reading a delight despite persistent themes of death and other existential agonies
Andrea Celenza (2016) Revista di Psicoanalisi
Brody's marvelous book, Entering Night Country: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Loss and Resilience, with its poetic writing, its breadth of knowledge, and depth of feeling addresses the analyst's experience of coming face to face with the awareness of life's limitations - of vulnerability, alienation, loss and death ..... With elegance, grace and the fortitude to face her own mortality, Brody addresses the most essential topics of the psychoanalytic endeavor: the desire to heal and the elements that can thwart us, the inherent limitations in every clinical encounter, the grief and mourning that lie within each of us, and the inevitability of loss .... Every psychoanalyst should wander through the dark crevices, the shadowy corners, and the light-filled spaces that are revealed within the pages of Entering Night Country.
....Ultimately, Brody's book is about how analyst and patient together begin to genuinely grapple with the reality of their mortality. Brody's book is a remarkable exploration of the liminal spaces between the known and the almost-known aspects of the mind, between the patient and the analyst, between language and symbol, between spoken and unspoken, and ultimately, between life and death. The beauty of her writing, the scope of her knowledge, the wisdom, empathy and awareness that this volume contains, are stunning.
Anne Adelman (2019) The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 88:1, 212-219