Reading and relating with Frieda Fromm‐Reichmann and Joanne Greenberg

contemporary of Freud, and one of the wave of German migrs who imported the talking cure to the United States in the 1930s.Hospitalised with schizophrenia, Greenberg became her preeminent patient, chronicling her extraordinary treatment in a bestselling autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964).The case of Greenberg and Fromm-Reichmann (renamed, in the novel, 'Deborah' and 'Dr Fried') eludes the usual interpretive moves of analytic literary theory.Rose Garden isn't simply a text to which one 'applies' analytic ideas; rather, the novel itself charts a successful analysis in action, grounding theory in clinical practice.Read alongside Fromm-Reichmann's contemporaneous papers, it also affords a rare opportunity to see analysis from both sides.Novel and case notes, taken together, capture an 'interlocutory duet'-a two-way exchange through which doctor and patient collaboratively build a healing bond. 4Placing this analytic encounter in its full intellectual context opens larger historical vistas, shedding new light on post-war psychiatry, treatments of psychosis, and interactions between analysis and social science.It also reveals how literary texts enact and invite therapeutic relations, illuminating the ethical stakes of critical reading.In this wider sense, Greenberg and Fromm-Reichmann's relationship reorients how we read and relate to fiction, to illness, and to each other. Returning to the interpersonal turnAs the method wars of the 2010s disappear in the rearview mirror, recent research has sought to remind us that there's much more to psychoanalysis than rigidly dogmatic 'critique'.Eschewing the usual suspects (Freud and Lacan), such studies recover subtler strands of analysis, which forsake so-called 'symptomatic reading' for less reductive ways of relating.Much of the best work in this vein engages the conceptual resources of British object relations.Drawing on Wilfred Bion, Michael Balint and others, Alicia Christoff's 'relational readings' of Victorian novels remodel how we might relate analytic theory to literary texts, without sliding into mere 'symptom-finding'. 5Similarly, David Russell shows how such figures as D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner temper Freud's 'zeal for interpretation' with a more 'tactful idiom of relation', less fixated on 'explanation, information or suspicion'. 6Anchored in Kleinian child analysis, object relations vividly map how relationships shape psychic structure.But this perspective pays less attention to the immediate, concrete relation between analyst and patient.This, I'll suggest, is where critics could learn from a further tradition.Complementing object relations, interpersonal analysis expands our