Marilyn Charles is noted for her efforts to translate dense psychoanalytic terms into language that is accessible and clinically relevant. In Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Life: The Stories We Live, she pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room.

Psychoanalysis offers many concepts that are extremely useful clinically but not always accessible in the original. In Psychoanalysis and Literature:The Stories We Live, Marilyn Charles pairs case vignettes with examples from literature to highlight the essential human struggles that play out in the consulting room. This pairing depathologizes those struggles and offers a conceptual framework that can help the clinician facilitate these journeys of discovery. Describing first how literature affords an opportunity for vicarious engagement with struggles endemic to the human condition, she then focuses on trauma, dreams, and ‘cultural collisions’turning more explicitly to the developmental challenges of identity, relatedness, aging, and generativity. Psychoanalysis and Literature is accessible, relevant, and timely.