A Beholder's Share

A Beholder's Share demonstrates how a sense of reality is evoked in the unpredictable space between imagination and adaptation. The world calls forth something in each of usa beholders sharewhich in turn calls forth something in the world. Though usually viewed as opposites, imagination and reality make uneasy but necessary bedfellows. Part I of A Beholders Share shows how fantasy generates novelty by creating versions of what is already known, while imagination allows what seems familiar to be seen afresh. Goldmans essays offer unexpected takes on common clinical encounters: clashes of belief, the search for generational dialogue, the awkward discomfort of feeling like a fake, the problem of how and when to end analysis, the strains of working with psychotic anxieties. Part II, Winnicotts Living Legacy, illuminates Winnicotts preoccupation with difficulties inherent in contact with reality. These chapters bring to life Winnicotts personal struggle with an area of experience his own two analyses failed to touch, the tangled relationship with Masud Khan, his recognition of dissociation as "a queer kind of truth," and how Romantic poets shaped Winnicotts view of what is felt as real. Bringing together Dodi Goldmans seminal and new writings, A Beholders Share will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as students and teachers of the arts, literature, and humanities.