With a preface by Adam Phillips'These stories combine the power of poetry and drama. A psychoanalyst attempts to listen to the power of words - to echoes of a barely grasped language of love. Where people come to analysis with lost trajectories and broken pathways, the remaking of these pathways is something that allows them to sustain precious but precarious connections. The seven stories told here are antidotes to the bewilderment of passion. Finding the pathways that people travel on is one thing, but finding the momentum that keeps them to these pathways is quite another. The stories in this book investigate these linkages - and the energy that maintains them - in very vivid language, and with a great clarity of perception. Patricia Touton-Victor brings about a transformation of words, an alembic that allows people to reconstruct an engagement with their history.'- Professor Bernard Burgoyne, Lacanian psychoanalyst'Many psychoanalysts' stories are some combination of the prolix, the didactic, and the narcissistic. These seven tales by Patricia Touton-Victor display none of these traits. But through their economy, modesty, and absence of message, they contain a great wealth for anyone interested in what a psychoanalysis might or could be. In them, the psychoanalyst is neither hero nor savant. The patients are not opponents to be won over or dupes to be enlightened. Rather, the patients are patient - they suffer, expressing their pains and desires to this analyst as best they can. She, in turn, is patient; in her listening, replying, and companionship. Her aim, her desire, would seem to be to enable the patients to become creative partners in the process of them discovering, articulating, and owning themselves as singular subjects.'This is all expressed with great simplicity of means, which might make it sound like a simple process. But Patricia Touton-Victor deftly reveals how, on the one side, for the patient this entails peeling back the many intertwined layers of histories, voices, and experiences within which their own singular voice has been both conceived and concealed. And, on the other side, how the analyst also has to pass through circles of uncertainty, confusion, and turmoil in trying to keep her place alongside and for the patient. Simple and complex; sparse and rich; painful and full of hope. To this analyst, these stories offer both an unmistakeably personal account of one analyst's engagement with her patients; and an unmistakeably truthful and enriching reflection of the process we undertake in common.'- Roger Bacon, psychoanalyst, Edinburgh
