Review of Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology.

Contends that since Kohut's death, a new generation of self psychologists continues to push forward into the areas he pioneered. In Structures of Subjectivity, Atwood and Stolorow offer a valuable new perspective within this psychoanalytic movement. They present their perspective in the form of a well-organized, comprehensive framework that speaks to the fundamental issues of psychoanalytic psychology--personality, development, psychopathology, and clinical theory and technique. The foundation for this psychological framework consists of the intriguing concepts of "structures of experience" and "intersubjectivity." At the heart of Structures of Subjectivity lies an epistemological dilemma about the nature of psychoanalytic phenomenology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Lacan.

Reviews the book, Lacan by Malcolm Bowie (see record 1991-97907-000). What is on offer here is one outcome of a conversation in which Lacan's texts--whatever their difficulties, obscurities, and seductive attractions--have been obliged to make their sense in and to a larger field of psychoanalytic concerns. Bowie divides Lacan's career into five main phases, to each of which he devotes a chapter. Bowie's is a strong and frequently persuasive partitioning of Lacan's development. The interplay between Bowie's style and his interrogation of Lacan's style is central and productive throughout the book. Those who have been wrestling with Lacan for some time will find there is room for reservations about Bowie's Lacan, and some of those reservations will be of possibly considerable consequence in the end. There will also be reservations provoked into explicitness by--and so also indebted to--Bowie's own argumentative clarity and force. And for those who are not already at grips with Lacan, for those who want an introduction to Lacan that is at once straightforward and fully serious, at once skeptical and generous, it is hard to imagine any other work that would serve as well. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The works of Jacques Lacan: An introduction.

Reviews the book, The works of Jacques Lacan: An introduction by Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy (1986). Thanks to its clarity, this is a book that allows us to raise the whole issue of Lacan's version of psychoanalysis. "The aim of this book," its first sentence says, "is to give a clear introduction to the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan". In this, Benvenuto and Kennedy have succeeded admirably. If you are looking for a book to guide your students or yourself through Lacan's version of psychoanalysis, I know of none I would recommend more highly. Lacan's writing is witty and playful, but notoriously difficult. Benvenuto and Kennedy include just enough quotations from Lacan to make one grateful one is reading a summary and not the original. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Humor and psyche: Psychoanalytic perspectives.

Review of book: James W. Barron. Humor and psyche: Psychoanalytic perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999, xi + 232 pp.. Reviewed by Jeffrey Berman. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out.

Reviews the book, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out by Slavoi Zizek (1992). The following reviews one of Slavoi Zizek's books, Enjoy your symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. Zizek's book and this review aim to address the relevance of Lacan for many of the ethical questions that arise when psychology begins to envision its own concepts and practices as culturally embedded. The matrix of discourse, power, and subject is most often articulated in psychology through the ideas of Foucault, but Lacan illuminates the same field of effects with closer attention given to the specifics of language (discourse), the body, the individual, and intersubjectivity. Lacan most obviously addresses the role of speech in a clinical setting. But the implications reach further and Slavoi Zizek takes the Lacanian intervention into the social order. At present Zizek represents the most explicit and uncompromising Lacanian reader of contemporary culture. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of The Psychoanalytic Process: Theory, Clinical Observation and Empirical Research.

The authors have tied their theory of psychopathology to notions of what fosters therapeutic progress and have then taken the unusual step of testing these ideas systematically and scientifically. Their book will appeal especially to those who are receptive to a cognitively oriented psychoanalytic approach and who advocate more informed, scientifically rigorous psychoanalytic research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory.

Greenberg and Mitchell's study of object relations in psychoanalytic theory is a valuable and insightful discussion and synthesis of disparate theoretical perspectives. Their work is timely in that the forefront of psychoanalytic theory and technique today is in the area of object relations; Greenberg and Mitchell's analysis of the object relations perspective is the most thorough, detailed, and complete theoretical discussions that the reviewer has read. In the reviewer's view, the book might have been strengthened if evidence other than theoretical and clinical material had been introduced in support of the authors' arguments, but their aim clearly did not involve assessing empirical support for object relations models. Thus, it is concluded that the authors' approach is valuable, but lacks breadth and denies the existence of some evidence that is potentially valuable in comparing different theoretical perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Jacques Lacan & Co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985.

Reviews the book, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A history of psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, written by Elisabeth Roudinesco and translated by J. Mehlman (1990). This volume focuses on the relations among psychoanalysis, surrealism, and the Communist movement. To set up her central argument that Lacan was infinitely more than a doctor with psychoanalytic training, that he had had a literary and political past, Roudinesco begins with his background in Hegelian philosophy and his associations with the Surrealists. Throughout the book, she comes back to their influence on his thoughts and actions. Roudinesco succeeds in demonstrating that Lacan, early on, had his feet planted in both the literary and medical milieus and that French writers were far ahead of the doctors in their acceptance of psychoanalysis. Roudinesco reaffirms what we all know, that Lacan has become a legend--that his texts were sacralized; his person, gestures, and habits imitated; his own itinerary rewritten by himself in 1932 and in 1966. Whatever her reader's predisposition or psychoanalytic credo, Roudinesco has recapitulated brilliantly the battles among French psychoanalysts and has provided the liveliest and most animated portrait of French intellectual history. And even if she has stressed the most absurd and outlandish components of this history, it is the most amusing scholarly book I have ever been asked to review. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic Theories, Volume 2.

This text consists of 7 chapters. With one exception, each author reviews his or her own programmatic research, along with related empirical and theoretical findings. This was also the format in Volume 1. The reviewer found a commonality in these contributions--representing as they do vital, but varied approaches to experimental psychoanalytic psychology--an interest in the question: What is the nature and the development of thinking and how does it vary in psychopathological states? Volume 2 provides a general education to the psychoanalyst and also stimulates and extends his or her theoretical and research interests. The chapters, different as they are in methodology, topic, and style of presentation, represent a shared and successful effort to further knowledge through a reasoned psychoanalytic empiricism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Paging Dr. Froid: Teaching Psychoanalytic Theory to Undergraduates.

Teaching psychoanalytic theory to undergraduates is hampered by many contemporary biases, including the reputation of Freud as a remote and disapproving patriarch. One way to undo this corrosive image when teaching undergraduates is not to deemphasize Freud but to embrace the parts of Freud's work that are revolutionary, creative, witty, and entertaining. Historical context can help students identify with the young, iconoclastic Freud and therefore increase their openness to Freudian ideas. Examples of teaching practices and students' responses are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California: A graduation.

This article presents Peskin's speech at the second graduation of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. In it, he discusses psychoanalytic politics and the continuing development of psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The double life of Véronique: An inquiry into the existence of woman.

This article is an analysis of the film La Double Vie de Veronique (The Double Life of Véronique; de la Fuente & Kieslowski, 1991) from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. It explores significant differences in the experiences of two women, roles played by the same actress, presented in the film as identical in appearance, living in different places at the same time, and sharing similar life challenges and opportunities. The differences manifest themselves in their relation to the women's remarkable singing ability, their lovers, and familial figures. The early loss of the primary object, the mother, determines both women's being--one of the women more on the side of the normative woman, covering over the loss at the price of death, the other mourning the loss more subtly but no more immune to the forces within her. Both demonstrate Lacan's (1975) axiom that "Woman does not exist," namely, that she lives precariously near the real, on the boundaries of the symbolic and the imaginary. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of When theories touch: A historical and theoretical integration of psychoanalytic thought.

Reviews the book, When theories touch: A historical and theoretical integration of psychoanalytic thought by Steven J. Ellman (2010). For anyone interested in studying the evolutionary history of psychoanalytic thinking, Steven Ellman’s When theories touch offers the most complete, most intelligently selected and organized, most instructive text available. Ellman understands very well that psychoanalysts writing about theory are all too often either sectarians or pluralists. Sectarians, by devoting themselves too exclusively to a single angle of view, remain overly limited and mistake the part for the whole. Pluralists, on the other hand, avoid the necessary scientific work of adjudicating among competing truth claims and resolving category errors by positioning various theories in relation to one another. Ellman steers a course nicely between Scylla and Charybdis. By focusing on the points at which theories touch, Ellman, in effect, invites us to hover over the blind men and take a look at the elephant as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Entering the circle: Hermeneutic investigation in psychology.

Reviews the book, Entering the circle: Hermeneutic investigation in psychology edited by R.B. Addison and M.J. Packer (1989). Entering the Circle is highly recommended, if only to familiarize us with (or remind us of) the penetrating critique and contribution that hermeneutic thought offers psychology. In addition this book should be recommended because it contains, perhaps more so then other books of this genre, a diverse group of essays (dealing with developmental, clinical, social and educational psychology) that grapple with methodological and practical issues of hermeneutic psychology by reporting on research that is grounded, to a greater or lesser extent, in a hermeneutic approach. Also, another distinctive aspect of this book is that it is almost entirely devoted to the concerns of hermeneutics (the catchword "interpretive," often used in this book, I take to be interchangeable with "hermeneutic"), and thereby distinguishes itself from what has come to be known as existential or phenomenological psychologies—a distinction that for many purposes is unnecessary but may prove to be helpful in the future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Understanding transference: The CCRT method.

Reviews the book, Understanding transference: The CCRT method by Lester Luborsky and Paul Crits-Cristoph (1990). Understanding transference: The CCRT method presents a detailed overview of the research of Lester Luborsky, Paul Crits-Christoph, and their colleagues at the Penn Center for Psychotherapy Treatment and Research. Luborsky is one of the pioneers of psychoanalytic process research over the past 30 years. Since the late Seventies, he has elaborated the concept of the core conflictual relationship theme (CCRT). In this important book, the authors describe the evolution of the concept, present research in a number of areas using the CCRT, and give clinical applications of the CCRT. Reflecting the title, the authors are also interested in comparing the CCRT with Freud's writing on transference. Another aspect of the group's work is an interest in the concept of narrative, both as a unit of study and as a theoretical issue. In this review, Rosbrow tries to explain their concepts, elaborate key findings which are striking and clinically significant, and discuss theoretical issues--both those raised explicitly by the authors and also those stimulated by reading this book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Disavowal and the Culture of Deadening: Revisiting Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.

Using psychoanalytic constructs of necrophilia and disavowal, the author revisits Stanley Kubrick's (1999) film Eyes Wide Shut from a cultural perspective. Disavowal, the failure to fully grasp the meaning of what is perceived, may help explain why viewers missed disturbing necrophilia meanings in this film. Various faces of necrophilia (as orientations against life, neurotic fantasies, and true perversions) are discussed. The author speculates that participants in a contemporary culture may also use disavowal vis-a-vis values against life that some current institutions endorse. Kubrick's eye-opening message could be that people do not have their eyes wide open to see the violence embedded in the necrophilous model that some institutions hold, values that, in a marketing society, people may consume without sufficient awareness or questioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Transference: Its meaning and function in psychoanalytic therapy.

Reviews the book, Transference: its meaning and function in psychoanalytic therapy by Benjamin Wolstein (see record 1955-01021-000). The book reflects the groping trends of opinion developing from therapeutic experience and from increased awareness of the problems of definition. Many questions related to transference are brought closer to the status of answerable questions. The author sees transference in terms of observable here-and-now behavior. He keeps the focus on present interactions with careful attention to the therapist as an interbehaving organism (countertransference) rather than as a hypnotic authority. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Contexts of being: The intersubjective foundations of psychological life.

Reviews the book, Contexts of being: The intersubjective foundations of psychological life by Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood (see record 1992-98615-000). In this book, the authors present a well-organized and systematic presentation of their intersubjective approach to psychotherapy. This book represents the culmination of at least the past thirteen years of Stolorow and Atwood's research program. They make good use of the limited space by addressing some of the most pivotal concepts in the field of psychotherapy. This work is likely to become a recognized contribution within the history of psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Handbook of interpersonal psychoanalysis and Pioneers of interpersonal psychoanalysis.

Reviews the books, Handbook of interpersonal psychoanalysis, edited by Marylou Lionells, John Fiscalini, Carola H. Mann, and Donnel B. Stern (see record 1995-99011-000) and Pioneers of interpersonal psychoanalysis, edited by Donnel B. Stern, Carola H. Mann, Stuart Kantor, and Gary Schlesinger (see record 1995-99013-000). Of all the principal psychoanalytic schools in contemporary America--Freudian or classical, object relations, self psychological, and interpersonal--the last has stood at the greatest remove from orthodoxy, in part because its founders, most notably Sullivan and Fromm, were not closely linked to the institutional centers. The growing emphasis of world analysis on relational experience, however, as both an influence on personality development and with important implications for treatment, has thrown most of the schools closer together, and the rich contributions of the so-called interpersonalists have made this proximity of even greater importance. The two books prompting these remarks are the most complete and forthright statements of the interpersonal position available. They provide an opportunity to review this position, its gradually emergent effects on clinical work particularly, and the problems and possible solutions resulting. Of course, this interpersonal effort at understanding both treatment and the self does not complete the story. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)