A Dialogue on Love

Rating:
Summary: Moving portrait of psychoanalysis
Review: Sedgwick, the doyenne of the queer studies movement in literary studies, avoids the sentimentality and sensational voyeurism that mar many recountings of psychotherapy. Her intimate narrative-written during therapy after cancer treatment-provides a moving and honest account of what it means to discuss with a stranger one's deepest anxieties about illness, mortality, dependence, and vulnerability. Sedgwick's aim is to capture the transformative possibilities of seemingly banal interactions with a paid companion.

The book uses the literary forms of Platonic dialogue and haibun, a 17th-Century Japanese prose-and-haiku travel narrative. The interlocutors are Sedgwick and her therapist; the dialogue consists of Sedgwick's retelling of therapeutic interactions, excerpts from her therapist's notes, and numerous mediating haiku glosses. Although some poems fall flat, Sedgwick's use of haibun produces an intricate map of the frustrations, ambivalences, and paradoxes that marked her therapeutic journey. These nuances make compelling her portrait of the life-changing potential of good therapy.

Although they dominate the narrative, the specific issues of Sedgwick's therapy-her attraction to death, masochistic fantasies of coerced consent, and uncertain sexual identity-stand only as particular examples for her universalist vision of the good in therapy. Sedgwick avoids the shallowness of both abstract clinical case studies and of uncritical gushes from the contemporary 'culture of therapy'. What results is appealing indeed: a deeply personal account of psychoanalysis that conveys genuine emotional depth.