Galit Atlas, "Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, And The Secrets of Emotional Intimacy" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

As the popular jazz standard tells us, “comes love, nothing can be done”, or can it? Galit Atlas begs to differ in her most recent book Come Closer: Childhood Wounds, Adult Love, and the Secrets of Emotional Intimacy, which describes six kinds of emotional styles, as we might call them, made manifest when we are young. Atlas, whose work has endeavored to sexualize the Relational School, here turns an eye both keen and wistful, towards love.

So, I admit to having read a few, but only a few, well maybe more than a few books like this, books that are psychoanalytically informed yet meant for a popular audience. In fact I credit one of them, Harriet Goldhor Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, for edging me towards the study of psychoanalysis. (Yes she is the mother of the author Ben Lerner btw, a fact I love.)

As a kind of preview to Atlas’ book, I want to share a little about how I read for NBiP interviews as on reading this book, my usual mode slipped away. I think that reveals something essential about Come Closer.

As an interviewer who speaks almost exclusively to authors of psychoanalytic books, I tend to read what populates my chosen queue tuned into a writer’s lineages. I am curious to see how the author situates themselves within the field’s family tree.

As an analyst who interviews, I also read hoping to find some help, like what to do with the fact that yesterday serious psychic quicksand started to seep its seep into my consulting room and I am scared. Can you, dear author, can you keep me from being pulled under?

Between a book’s covers I look for whether the author’s hand is grabbing mine, are our eyes meeting, do we share a wink, a nod, or get a leg up? And when a piece of psychoanalytic writing gives forth the new or the unexpected, like Dianne Elise, like Avgi Saketopolou? I live for it.

I am sometimes a demanding reader and my “process” is quasi-athletic, certainly physical: as a child I slumbered with novels that tumbled from my hands to collapse on my chest as I lost consciousness. I have spent the night together with many an NBiP author whose book ended up under my pillow crooking my neck.

I carried many of you on every train line. You gave me tennis elbow. I read you before the lights go out at the cinema and again as the curtain comes up, taking notes in the margins that I often cannot read three days later.

I highlight. I underline. I fold pages in half, leave exclamation points, write the words ‘yes’ or ‘no’ emphatically and if I don’