Word: shinefeld
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...frantic search for emotional connection. The New York City landscape of August is littered with suicides, failed marriages, estranged children and an assortment of ambivalent sexual identities. The one successful relationship is built between two women: Dawn Henley, 18 at the outset, an orphaned college student, and Dr. Lulu Shinefeld, her fortyish psychoanalyst. In classic Freudian fashion, the patient seeks a surrogate parent. The analyst, a divorcee and failed mother, comes to view her patient as a surrogate daughter. Each woman uses the analytic relationship to relive, and make up for, errors that were made in their other lives outside...
...Shinefeld, her ex-husband, her friends and her feckless, casually cruel lover are all analysts, occupying a narrow world whose poles are the brownstones bordering Central Park and the beaches of the Hamptons. The doctor is preoccupied by a frequently tedious midlife crisis that seems trifling and ill motivated by comparison with the traumas of her benumbed patient. Dawn was born to a catatonic, who committed suicide when her child was an infant, and a male homosexual, who died in a boating accident a year later. She has been raised by a leathery lesbian aunt and her feminine girlfriend, whom...
Many of the characters are shrewdly if harshly drawn stereotypes. Only Dawn is wholly likable, and her situation is so extreme that the reader pays a credulity tax with almost every chapter. Dr. Shinefeld, effective as a therapist, is a lulu of a loser as a woman. Ressner's treatment suggests that what another writer called the Impossible Profession is still beyond easy analysis. -By William A. Henry...
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