Abstract
It is with a mix of delight and sadness that we present the final essay in our series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. We greatly appreciate the depth and range of reviews that our guest editors, Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris, have brought to this project. Taken together, our reviewers’ reactions show how Winnicott’s ideas continue to guide and inform contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Though we are sorry to see the project conclude, we are pleased to close it with a thoughtful essay by Lesley Caldwell, co-editor of the Collected Works. We are indeed grateful to Blumberg and Harris for the care with which they have overseen this exceptional project over several years.
In a book essay on virtuality, Aden Evens brings into conversation two distinctly different volumes—Hannah Zeavin’s The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy and Richard Frankel and Victor Krebs’s Human Virtuality and Digital Life: Philosophical and Psychoanalytic Investigations. Evens, an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth, brings to his work on media, the digital, and philosophy a long-standing interest in psychoanalysis that equips him to view the digital world through an analytic lens. The two books reviewed in this essay each grapple—as impartially as possible, and from varied angles—with the impact on self and other of an increasingly digital world. Fortuitously (given our recent focus on Winnicott)—as Evens notes—each work draws on Winnicott’s thinking: Zeavin invokes the Winnicott whose radio addresses “appeal[ed] to the masses of forlorn mothers whose male partners [were] off fighting in World War II,” thereby beginning to “pave the way for call-in shows that dispense advice, entertainment, and wisdom for life”; and for Frankel and Krebs, Evens observes, the Winnicott whose “image of the infant as omnipotent, experiencing no difference between desire and fulfillment, provides an opportunity . . . to stake out a place for the virtual in the infant psyche and so to establish a human virtual.” Zeavin’s approach is pragmatic, opening the notion of distance treatment as a legitimate means to meet the real demands of the current world. Frankel and Krebs focus more on the psychic meaning of the digital. Both volumes, Evens concludes, invite exploration of the digital as an “actor in its own right.”
Louisa Hong next offers a timely and poignant review of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Women and Their Experience of Desire, Ambition and Leadership, edited by Stephanie Brody and Frances Arnold. Hong observes that though the book was published in 2019, the topic remains timely—perhaps even more pressing now than a few years ago, given current turmoil around issues related to women’s bodies and women’s freedom. As Hong writes, “The book trumpets the danger—not a new one, but now taking on renewed urgency—to women’s minds and bodies, and to our roles in society.” Hong points out that though early psychoanalytic theories may have done harm, psychoanalysis has evolved in ways that that can “help women develop their power, privately and publicly.” She goes on to remark that in the view of the volume’s editors, Brody and Arnold, “it is imperative that the field embrace this aim, lest it become irrelevant to women’s struggle against oppression or, worse, complicit in it.” Focusing on three primary themes—desire, ambition, and leadership—the volume will speak deeply to “anyone interested in understanding the complex psychological factors that characterize the often missing, misunderstood, or misrepresented experience of women.”
In a review of Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, Tyger Latham invites us into his close reading of a book that stretches well beyond our familiar formulations and, as such, “explicitly ask[s] so much from [the reader].” In it, he tells us, Saketopoulou destabilizes readers with the disrupting power of her language and the grit of her theory. She is, Latham writes, “invested in challenging the restrictive ways in which psychoanalytic theory has tended to treat trauma, seeing it as a psychic condition in need of repair.” Latham heeds Saketopoulou’s plea that, rather than work to relieve our patients of trauma, we remain “open to understanding the various permutations trauma can undergo and examine what our patients actually do with their trauma.” He also appreciates the author’s discussion of Laplanche’s theory of intergenerational transmission of unconscious childhood sexual trauma, and her subsequent exploration of “how infantile sexuality manifests in everyday life.” For Latham, Saketopoulou’s examination of sexual and racial trauma offers the powerful argument that “trauma can be transformative, in ways that can be enigmatic but nonetheless meaningful.”
Claudia Cristina Antonelli reviews The Analyst as Storyteller, edited by Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau. Though the Covid shutdown wrought profound ruptures in our world, Antonelli shows us that it also gave rise to a unique creative project, uniting psychoanalytic voices from around the world in a collective experiment in writing. The book originated in a meeting of the IPA in Culture Committee during the pandemic, with the aim of “sharing cultural elements with our colleagues around the globe.” This creative project, Antonelli writes, yielded a rich, diverse, multicultural tapestry of stories from analysts who turned their sharp wit, acute perceptions, and infinite imaginations to the page. The project allowed for the imagination to carry across continents to envision stories with lively details, intricate plots, and, above all, shared humanity and sustenance during a time of shared hardship and worry. Antonelli’s review provides a rich tasting of this literary smorgasbord.
Owen Lewis reviews Jersey Breaks: Becoming an American Poet, a memoir by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Himself a poet, as well as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and professor, Lewis is exquisitely attuned to the layers of meaning held in poetic images. Musing on the proffered promise of a memoir, Lewis sets out to investigate the enigmatic title of Pinsky’s book. He wonders how to understand the very process of “becoming a poet” that is Pinsky’s subject, asking, “Does one ‘become a poet’ just once in one’s life? Or is there a way in which a poet must again and again become a poet?” Lewis describes the breadth and depth of Pinsky’s life as a poet, and elucidates the rich and diverse meanings of the book’s title, Jersey Breaks. Ultimately, Lewis tells us, “one is allowed to see the ongoing, evolving process of a life lived in poetry and a suggestion that becoming a poet continues throughout a life.”
Owen Lewis closes this issue of the Review of Books with “Why I Write (Poetry).” For Lewis, poetry opens a universe of possibility: “Like the safety of the analytic setting, writing gives permission to know and to feel in the setting of the writing’s structure.” Invoking Dickinson’s advice to “tell all the truth but tell it slant,” Lewis suggests that poetry allows an experience of both recognition and discovery. “It is through metaphor and allusion,” he writes, “that true feeling reveals itself. Writing that connects must tempt and suggest and leave room for the others’ experiences. It is not always clear how language structures do this, but it is magical when it does happen.” Magical, indeed, when the “holding environment” of poetry allows for the rich and complex unfolding of maturation, self-understanding, and transformation.
