YULIA AND EVE INVITE TO EDEN (BOOK REVIEW OF Y. MEDYNSKA’S “PSYCHOANALYTIC ESSAYS”)

Abstract

The “Psychoanalytic essays” – inpatient and outpatient research, articles, reports at conferences or symposia, as well as important and interesting topics related to the psychoanalytic understanding of the various places that the subject occupies in relation to others, discourse, and how he tries to cope with it – systemizes professional elaboration of reasoning, doubts, and analysis of everyday work of Yulia Medynska – psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, candidate of psychological sciences. This book is, in a way, the author’s structural invention and is extremely useful in its content both for those who study psychoanalysis and for those specialists who understand their own incompleteness and fate: we know little until the analysand entrusts us with their secret, its intersubjective truth. In the book review, special attention is paid to understanding the "impossibility" of the profession, the author's rich experience while working in a hospital, and reflections on the place of psychoanalysis in a medical institution, mastering the linguistic, mythological, narrative field there, creating constructive coping strategies, promoting the emergence of emotional intelligence and safe communicative space for psychotic patients or patients with borderline disorders. The review also draws readers' attention to the author's particular studies on key topics of psychoanalysis: narcissism and narcissistic couples, the problem of identification, transference, and countertransference, as well as considerations regarding the causes of anorexia nervosa, understanding problems between siblings, etc. The topics of the Jungian approach to understanding the collective unconscious, feminine archetypes in the formation of the Ukrainian mentality, stigmas and their destigmatization, psychoanalytic understanding of time, and mistakes in psychoanalysis. In general, the collection of essays by Yulia Medinskaya serves as a model of writing psychoanalytic texts, a creative approach to understanding both her place in all these stories, and another heroine of the book – not Yulia, but Eva not-Medinskaya, who is an equally important guide into Eden, where it is not so comfortable, calm and problem-free as it seems at first glance, and therefore the acquisition of own experience in communicating with famous people and quite psychoanalytical thinking force you to leave it in anticipation of changes.