From The Editors

Winnicott’s Collected Works: A Series of Reviews (Continued)

This issue of Review of Books begins with the sixth installment in a series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, curated by guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris. In a review essay on Volume 6—titled “Eating Your Cake and Having It”—Peter Goldberg presents some of Winnicott’s most creative thinking, and traces its influence on contemporary theory and practice. The breadth of Goldberg’s review speaks to the singularly generative nature of a short period of time: 1960–1963.

Psychoanalysis Present Tense

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son about the realities of being a Black man in America, explores the deep racial divides in America and uncovers the roots of racism in our history and in our present culture. In a voice that is personal, richly resonant, and deeply analytic, Aurelio Joseph Ogilvie shines a light on the power and significance of Coates’s book. Ogilvie’s sensitive and careful reading of Coates’s letter to his adolescent son brings the reader a multilayered and painful view of the complexities of parenting a young Black male; as Ogilvie writes, this involves “negotiating the pitfalls from within one’s own culture—poor educational opportunities, drugs, gang violence—and warding off threats from the external world, society at large, such as police brutality, systemic legal inequities, and relentless sociopolitical pressures to maintain the status quo.” In his review, Ogilvie offers a psychoanalytic reading of Coates, ultimately challenging psychoanalysts to recognize that “the world in which the analyst lives today is marked by racial hatred of the other—a world in which there is a fever pitch of mass police brutality, senseless attacks and murders of people of color.” Where, he asks, will psychoanalysis situate itself in the face of this reality?

In his beautifully evocative review of Love in the Time of Cholera in the time of Covid, Michael Krass offers an extraordinary and poignant view of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel. Krass invites the reader to reconsider Márquez’s legendary love story in light of the present, reinterpreting the undying passion between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza as narcissistically driven, exploitative, and ultimately disavowing cruelty and aggression: “to sustain life and love,” Krass writes, “by disavowing one’s own hurtfulness is to perpetuate and magnify hurtfulness and to live and love in a way that is, at its core, perverse.” Krass points out that “in our so frequently referring to the Covid-19 crisis in a way that alludes to this book’s title, perhaps we are unconsciously acknowledging the endemic use of disavowal that this viral pandemic has brought to light. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed as a myth the idea that ‘we are all in this together.’”

Suzanne Benser’s deft and thoughtful review of Noëlle McAfee’s Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis—winner of APsaA’s Courage to Dream Book Prize—calls for psychoanalysts to “no longer insulate ourselves from the larger culture or look away from our own participation [in it].” Benser carefully elucidates McAfee’s complex interweaving of psychoanalytic theory with critical social theory and democratic political theory. According to McAfee, Benser writes, “nationalism and polarization ensue when large groups of people respond to political threats with fantasies and defenses such as splitting and projection.” Benser allows that McAfee’s interdisciplinary approach—for example, drawing on Winnicott and others to consider individual fantasies in the context of political and social phenomena—may “challenge the confines of psychoanalytic theory.” Ultimately, however, Benser urges the reader to use McAfee’s insights to consider our current position as psychoanalysts, and to “to enact her practice of ‘radical questioning.’”

Clinical Theory and History

Dianne Elise’s Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field comprises papers Elise published from 1998 through 2017, “now reworked and linked”—according to reviewer Alison Brown—“by her focus on the creative and therapeutic potential of analytic eroticism.” From her opening paragraph forward, Brown brings both personal and professional experience to bear on her exploration of Elise’s thinking about “the erotics of the preoedipal period and their implications for oedipal experience, gender, and adult sexuality”; the impact of an “oedipal double rejection” on women; and “the impact, causes, and sequelae of boundary violations.” Though alert to the challenges of erotic experience in psychoanalysis—especially with regard to the potential for boundary violation—Brown deeply appreciates Elise’s contributions to our literature. “In relinking the maternal and the erotic,” Brown writes, Elise “brings the power of the sensual and the sexual back to the center of experience, theory, and practice.”

In his review of Irwin Hirsch’s Insight, Relationship, and Responsibility in Psychoanalysis, Paul Wachtel brings his sharp eye to a central theme in psychoanalysis: what drives change in psychoanalytic treatment? According to Wachtel, Hirsch emphasizes the mutative value of a new relational experience; however, Wachtel points out that Hirsch puts nearly equal emphasis on “the patient’s coming to know or understand or see something about himself, not the having of a new experience with the analyst.” According to Wachtel, Hirsch is at his best “when he holds these competing views in a productive dialectical tension, acknowledging and working with both the patient’s genuine agency and the ways that we all are shaped by events, experiences, and identifications with significant others.” Wachtel acknowledges that Hirsch is “a fierce defender of the equal humanity, maturity, and moral worth of the patient,” which “enables him to engage patients in a way that is noteworthy for its nonpathologizing respect for the patient’s moral agency”; however, he questions Hirsch’s “ideal of the rugged individualist, self-made and depending on no one, leaning on no one, shaping his or her own identity and destiny without identifying with others or building on the nurturant internalized images of others.” Wachtel suggests that Hirsch and other critics of “evidence-based practice” are at risk of “los[ing] the dialectic when they essentially brush aside what is perhaps the most fundamental insight of psychoanalysis—how readily we can deceive ourselves and see or remember what it is comfortable to see or remember.”

In Empathy: A History, the historian Susan Lanzoni explores shifts, over time, in the meaning of the word “empathy.” Reviewer Louis Rose approaches Lanzoni’s book with several questions relevant to the role of empathy in psychoanalysis. For example, “How does the process of empathy differ, if at all, from the processes of projection and identification?” And “does empathy possess a distinctive function or aim?” As an historian himself, Rose appreciates Lanzoni’s comprehensive inquiry into uses of the term “empathy” over time, and across many fields of study. As a psychoanalytic scholar, he highlights a perspective on empathy that Lanzoni and other historians share with psychoanalysts: that empathy involves an “effort to understand and interpret the multiple contexts—historical, political, social, and cultural—in which people’s decisions, actions, and choices acquire diverse meanings and consequences.” Historians, like psychoanalysts, “must explore [both] the external sources and internal pathways of overdetermined phenomena.”

Why I Write: Theodore Jacobs

Many of those familiar with Ted Jacobs know him to be a magnetic storyteller, able to capture with wit and wisdom the essence of a character, the meaning of an encounter between two people—to put his finger on the crux of human experience. In his “Chekhov Was a Doctor,” his Why I Write essay, Jacobs invites the reader to join in an investigation of his compulsion to write, which has bedeviled him for a lifetime. Whether writing short stories or case histories, he seeks to bring to life on the page “people we have come to know in our special way of knowing.” “If we want to make them known to others,” he writes, “we have to bring them alive . . . by depicting their struggles and triumphs, as experienced in their daily lives.” Drawn to the pleasure of the craft but equally to the experience of being known as a writer, Jacobs describes his delight in discovering his voice as an author, and the satisfaction of putting words together adroitly to convey the subtlety of his observations—the sense of self-enhancement that writing has brought him. These are “symptoms” that Jacobs willingly embraces, and that—through the elegance of his writing—enrich us all.