Granta 71 Shrinks opens with Elliot Perlman's "The Emotions Are Not Skilled Workers", perhaps intentionally undermining the analysis/analyst it draws so wonderfully; for if, as the title suggests, the emotions are not skilled, that they are messy and unruly, it raises the question whether a science of their explication is ever really possible. It is a story that knows in its heart the impossibility, the unknowableness, of unhappiness and its amelioration. Edmund White, whose beautiful prose style is as evident here as always, describes how the urge of psychoanalysis to define (in his case to define his homosexuality as a disease) is always dangerous--surely to be human, to be the eccentric collection of (self-)obsessions we are, is to be indefinable. He sees gay liberation as the death knell of Freudianism but others have seen it only as the death knell of a particular kind of response to Freud's writing.

Granta once again has provided us with some fine pieces by, among others, Justine Picardie, Paul Auster and Ian Parker to accompany the pieces by Perlman and White. Roy Hattersley adds an interesting article about the Third Way and Antony Gormley's bodies photographed by Gautier Deblonde fills the rest of a very fine package. This issue examines the experience from the patient's couch and the psychiatrist's chair, in both fiction and non-fiction. The contributors include Elliot Perlman, Patrick McGrath, Edmund White and Ved Mehta.