Judith L. Mitrani

The intimate, touching, witty, and unique memoir by a renowned psychoanalytic author and clinician who discovers the unexpected site of the most beautiful place in the world.This riveting memoir tells the tale of how the roots of one woman's yearnings, planted deeply in fertile dreams and disappointments, sprouted fresh possibilities, leafed out page by page and blossomed into a colorful and enduring romance. The author, a retired American psychoanalyst from Los Angeles, recognized for her many clinical publications, chronicles four years that fluttered by like autumn foliage into mounds of flashbacks upon an existence often blown off track and swept up as if by a gust of wind at surprising times and in unexpected directions. Following a sequence of sundry seasons and throughout broad and narrow ups and downs, the author settles not only in that most beautiful place that is the scintillating city of Paris, but even more significantly in a crisp, enduring, and resilient state of mind, a sturdy foundation for living experienced as the most beautiful place in the world."This is the fascinating story about a brilliant young woman who, caught in a dead-end marriage, took control of her destiny and became a world-renowned psychoanalyst. Her colorful descriptions of destinations around the world have resulted in my adding a number of them to my bucket list."Virginia in California, Retired Nuclear Physicist

An extraordinary depiction of one analyst's efforts to receive and respond to the vivid impressions of her patients raw and sometimes even unmentalized experiences as they are highlighted in the transference-countertransference connection. Mitrani attempts to feel, suffer, mentally transform, and, finally, verbally construct for and with the patient possible meanings for those immediate versions of lifes earliest experiences as they are re-enacted in the therapeutic relationship. She uses insights from this therapeutic work to contribute to the metapsychology of British and American object relations as well as to the psychoanalytic theory of technique. In these eleven essays, Dr Mitrani masterfully integrates the work of Klein, Winnicott, Bion and Tustin as she leads us on an expedition through primitive emotional territories. She clears the way toward detecting and understanding the survival function of certain pathological manoeuvres deployed by patients when confronted by unthinkable anxieties. In her vivid accounts of numerous clinical cases, she provides and demonstrates the tools needed to effect a transformation of unmentalized experiences within the context of the therapeutic relationship.

This volume consists of a series of essays inspired by Freud's paper on Jensen's novel Gradiva - "she who steps along." In the story a young archaeologist, Norbert Hanold, suffers from delusions but is able to unravel the mysteries of his emotional life and mind with the aid of a woman who does not challenge these delusions, but rather "steps along" with Hanold, gradually helping him to disentangle truth from fantasy, through what Freud called "cure by love". Gradiva, originally felt to be the source of Hanold's malady, eventually becomes the agent of its resolution and of his return to health. This extraordinary tale formed the basis for the author's concept of "taking the transference". Through clinical vignettes, various aspects of psychoanalytic technique - useful from the first encounter between patient and analyst and throughout the process of the development of mind to termination - are illustrated in detail.

Many people come to analysis appearing quite 'ordinary' on the surface. However, once below that surface, we often come into contact with something quite unexpected: 'extra-ordinary protections' created to keep at bay any awareness of deeply traumatic happenings occurring at some point in life.Judith Mitrani investigates the development and the function of these protections, allowing the reader to witness the evolution of the process of transformation, wherein defensiveness steadily mutates into communication.She lucidly and artfully weaves detailed clinical with a variety of analytic concepts, and her original notions - including 'unmentalized experience' and its expression in enactments; 'adhesive pseudo-object relations' and the way in which this contracts and compares with normal and narcissistic object relations - provide valuable tools for understanding the infantile transference/countertransference and for the refinement of our technique with primitive mental states.Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections will prove stimulating and accessible in its style and substance to a broad analytic readership, from the serious student of psychoanalysis to the most seasoned professional.