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Bonnie Friedman may be a dinosaur. But she is one of the happiest dinosaurs around.

For seven lucky years during the 1990s, Friedman went through successful psychoanalysis, even after the experts had pronounced Freud deader than a dodo. (Her husband's insurance had excellent psychiatric benefits, unlike those offered with managed care.)

Friedman started with writer's block and finished with two published memoirs. She went from the verge of divorce to a renewal of her marriage vows. She maintained her love for her parents even as she discovered why they depressed her. She broke up with the friends who took advantage of her but made peace with the sister who intimidated her.

She transformed envy for family, friends, and colleagues into a self-confidence that did not depend on accomplishments. Finally, after growing up in the Bronx and writing her books in New England, Friedman and her husband moved to Downtown Brooklyn, where she is working on a novel.

Love My Therapist, Love Myself

If this summary sounds too good to be true, please read Bonnie Friedman's The Thief of Happiness: The Story of an Extraordinary Therapy, just published in paperback by Houghton and Mifflin and on sale for $16 at all fine Brooklyn bookstores.

During a recent interview, Bonnie and I agreed that, in spite of the current disdain for Freud, it is hard to understand ourselves without using such household terms as projection, repression, regression, defense mechanism, unconscious, ego, id, and libido.

However, her therapy was not extraordinary because of her diagnoses. You won't find confessions about addiction, abuse or psychosis here. Depression and anorexia were more Friedman's style or, as she writes, she always felt "invisible" to herself and others. Many readers, this one included, will identify with Bonnie's effort to put "quiet desperation" behind her and get a life that would earn Thoreau's blessing.

But in the victims' sweepstakes, Bonnie's sister Anita sadly wins the prize; she has multiple sclerosis, a disease with ups and downs that cruelly fit her boom and bust personality. When your sister lives in a nursing home, it is hard not to leave her behind. Instead, Bonnie takes away from every visit Anita's vulnerability, humor, and warmth.

Bonnie's therapy was extraordinary because the love of her life happened to be her therapist, even if transference is a one-way street. Webster's defines "transference" as "the redirection of feelings and desires, and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood, toward a new object (as a psychoanalyst conducting therapy)."

Bonnie told me that "when I felt broken, my therapist gave me hope. She allowed me to make sense intuitively. Even my mistakes made sense to her. She gave me a feeling of wholeness and well-being. It's unusual to meet someone who understands you immediately."

Unusual in this case because Bonnie's description of her therapist sounds like the mother she never had. Her real mother was emotionally exhausted by the time Bonnie, her fourth and last child, arrived.

The pseudonym Bonnie created for her therapist, "Harriet Sing," evokes the homemaker from the '50s TV show "Ozzie and Harriet" and the abortive singing career of Bonnie's mother. Harriet Sing even looked like an idealized version of Bonnie's mother-tall and slim, elegant and energetic.

Write, She Said, and Don't Stop

The Thief of Happiness begins with Bonnie's contract to write her first book (at the age of 32) and establish herself as an independent woman of letters. However, the effort depressed her much like her own birth depressed her mother.

Will her book be the "abortion" she fears her mother always wanted? Or will Bonnie grow up by transforming her life into a best-seller? By choosing Harriet Sing as surrogate mother and spiritual guide, Bonnie Friedman displayed an instinct for survival she didn't know she had. Two weeks after meeting Harriet, Bonnie did away with her writing block as if she were at Lourdes. But for insurance's sake she continued the therapy. Said Bonnie, "I knew I wasn't cured."

"And now everything I wrote, because implicitly linked to her, brimmed with significance. My own handwriting on the page appeared intricate as lines of alephs and beths [Hebrew As and Bs] crooking toward some brand-new meaning and vibrating like the Mexican jumping beans that shimmied down the grooves of my childhood racetrack, dozens of capsules pulsing with life-worms? snails?-the pills throbbing in my warm hands. My own handwriting seemed like that. Because nothing the mind leapt to was imperfect. Nothing was an accident." (p. 33)

Bonnie Friedman is one of those lucky writers for whom the psychoanalytic method of free association brings life to the page. If there is one thing her brush with linguistic anorexia taught her, it's to keep going. So her story proceeds by leaps and bounds over past and present, and her metaphors spring out like jack in the boxes from a dream.

In her first book, Writing Past Dark, Bonnie talks about the physics of fiction, about the discipline of describing a world that requires heavy lifting emotionally and physically. Perhaps she retained more of her Bronx Science education than she realizes. I like a writer who wears her heart on her sleeve and knows how to use a defibrillator. Bonnie Friedman is such a writer.

Look Both Ways Before Crossing Your Therapist

When Bonnie told me she wanted a therapist who would change her dreams, she may not have realized the size of the challenge. Driving regularly four and then eight hours round trip to see Harriet Sing for an hour or two earns her fanatic's status in my book. Rejecting her friends and threatening her family with the same fate seems like an equally hard bargain to drive.

But Harriet Sing was not satisfied with her hand in Bonnie's social network. Increasingly she believed therapy should preempt Bonnie's outside life. And when Bonnie was ready to leave, Harriet insisted that Bonnie start over-on the problems she had with men. Did Bonnie trade the possibility of artistic death (writer's block) for the risk of psychological possession?

Only if you believe the Bonnie Friedman who told me she was "obsessively dependent" on Harriet Sing. There was another Bonnie, the Bonnie of the "counter-transference," who resisted the thoughts Harriet put in her head and kept her opinions to herself.

Her form of doodling was to project her feelings about the therapy on Harriet's Picasso print of a barnyard scene. The weekly variation in the condition of those Cubist crows, chickens, and cows was a barometer of the pressures inside her, including the need to keep writing. Once released, this need became an independent force.

She writes, "The secret of the razor wall compelled me as a girl. I pulled open the mirror to see the hidden mouth [of the medicine chest where her father inserted razor blades], which was like the narrow backstairs near the incinerator or the gold medallions on the corridor walls or the blue gas haloes my mother showed me behind the dryers in the basement near the milk machine, or even the skittering hard-shelled waterbugs that wandered fat as stopwatches over the painted green floor, part of an empire I inherited with a checkerboard lobby and murky chandelier." (p. 264)

Said Bonnie to me, "My greatest fear about ending the therapy was that I would miss her, that the feeling of loss would go on for years. I don't miss her. On the other hand, I sometimes expected life would be bliss. Instead, she was more like medication that cures a physical ailment and gets you back on your feet. I have a greater sense of satisfaction. I don't have that wild envy anymore. I value different things. Now I prefer sincere words to sophisticated, shiny sentences."

Bonnie's feeling of growing up invisible came from her perception of herself as an outsider. As in fairy tales, the glass slipper was always on someone else's foot. People were good or evil but never both. Thus the fairy-tale ring to the book's title, Thief of Happiness, turns out to be ironic. A thief implies an outside agent. There are any number of such culprits in the book, including Bonnie.

The trick of Bonnie's therapy was to discover happiness inside her; she did not need to steal it from anyone. Thus, therapy proceeded from the shared "bliss of interpretation" in Harriet's Maine attic office to the exhilaration of the book's last line. On her own "[She]…pushed open the front [apartment] door and stepped out onto the sunny, bustling city street" of Bay Ridge. In other words, Mohammed has gone to the mountain and returned with the literary equivalent of a Middle Eastern feast.