Psychoanalysis offers many concepts that are extremely useful clinically but not always accessible in the original. In Psychoanalysis and Literature: The Stories We Live, Marilyn Charles pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight the essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room. This pairing depathologizes those struggles and offers a conceptual framework that can help the clinician facilitate these journeys of discovery. Describing first how literature affords an opportunity for vicarious engagement with struggles endemic to the human condition, she then focuses on trauma, dreams, and ‘cultural collisions’ turning more explicitly to the developmental challenges of identity, relatedness, aging, and generativity. Psychoanalysis and Literature is accessible, relevant, and timely.

"A psychoanalyst in private practice, Charles provides an adroit exploration of the ways in which literature and clinical work often function as mappings of the same terrain—terrain that is at once intellectual, emotional, and behavioral. By bringing her work with patients in sync with her readings of literary texts—by writers from Herman Melville to Virginia Woolf to John Fowles—the author is able to look at the human condition, and the lived lives of her patients, from a vantage point outside the individual therapeutic case. Literature and literary metaphor afford Charles a mode of inquiry that has the special capacity to highlight the structures and patterns that underlie the particulars of a person's life. Charles's investigations of texts and lives crosses the territory of sensory experience, trauma, dreams, relatedness, and identity issues related to the collision of culture, aging, and death. One strength of the book is the author's refusal to pathologize the individual dilemmas playing out in her consulting room; she always sees her patients' lives as part of the larger human condition that literature has mapped independent of the healing arts and sciences. This book will have great appeal to those whose interests are humanistic, clinical, and philosophical, whatever the level of preparation. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers." - CHOICE

"One of my graduate school professors was fond of telling us that our role as therapists was to be the keepers of others’ stories. Psychoanalysis is a perspective keenly centered on the stories we tell ourselves, both about our own lives and in the realm of fictions. Charles’ Psychoanalysis and Literature is a great contribution to this ever-fruitful conversation." - Psychology Today