ABSTRACT
Philip Bromberg has been writing psychoanalytic articles for forty years. He knew that deep human contact was implicit in interpersonal theory, and he set out to find a way to bring these two necessities together. In the process, Bromberg made a deep and thorough study of the literature of psychic trauma, and he brought together the interest in dissociation that he found there, and had found throughout Sullivan, with the theory of the multiple self that he developed from Sullivan's (1953) interest in 'personifications'. Bromberg is one of the best writers among prominent psychoanalytic thinkers; he is always a pleasure to read. Bromberg presents his theme succinctly enough to deserve quotation: In a successful analytic treatment, there occurs a transformation of unthinkable 'not-me' self-states into enacted here-and-now events that, in the form of safe surprises, can be played out interpersonally, processed with the analyst's subjective experience of the same event, and become part of the patient's overarching configuration of me.
