BOOK FORUM
Schuyler W. Henderson,
MD, MPH
Assistant Editor
Analyze This! sychoanalysis has long investigated, appreciated, and in a sometimes gloomy, sometimes soulful way celebrated a fundamental solitude. You notice this in its respect for silences and long pauses, in its ruthless intellectualism, in the hushed work of one person talking in a dimly lit room, and monologues reviewing dramas taking place in the abandoned theater of the self. A respect for solitude makes psychoanalysis more than a little anachronistic in the socially networked uproar of today’s world. It’s no wonder that psychoanalysis has gone out of favor. This is an age of loudmouths and brash pundits, where volume determines what is right, just, and true; solitude is a form of privacy, but this is an era in which political and personal privacy is a quaint anachronism. Although The Sopranos is often cited as heralding a new beginning for television, I prefer to see it as signaling an end: it was the epitaph and the eulogy for the psychoanalytic era. None of this should upset psychoanalysts. They know that the repressed will return. When Nabokov, who energetically despised psychoanalysis, scoffs at the “fundamentally medieval” nature of Freud’s thinking,1(p20) he’s not entirely wrong; there is something mossy, monastic, and gothic in psychoanalysis. In solitude, sheltered from the cacophony of a contemporary world that thinks only the contemporary exists, the past in its shabbiness and vulgarity lives on. Fortunately, we still have books, one of the greatest pleasures to be had in solitude. (As an aside, it is crucial that you still buy paper books: whether or not you actually read them, how much you read, where you stop reading and begin again—in other words, how you move through the text—remains private and is not electronically registered in any way; it is worth preserving this solitary dimension to reading.) This month, we encounter books about 2 of the better-known figures in psychoanalytic history. Helena J.V. Rutherford reacquaints us with the beaming, benign pragmatism of Winnicott who was always a bit more dangerous and radical than he gets credit
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for. Then, I review a book about Anna Freud who arguably did more than any other single person to create our field. We end with a book about a concept loosely derived from psychoanalysis, introversion; Leah Guttman reviews a book about what it means to be an introvert in a world that has so little respect for interiority. REFERENCE 1. Nabakov V. Speak Memory. New York: Vintage; 1989.
Donald Winnicott Today. Edited by Jan Abram. East Sussex: Routledge, 2013.
D
onald Winnicott contributed widely to the field of psychoanalysis. Donald Winnicott Today discusses these contributions and their influence on analytic thought. One of his leading contributions, which plays a central role in the collected chapters of Donald Winnicott Today, was his recognition of the embodiment of the mother–infant relationship. His notion of primary maternal preoccupation offered a critical insight into the changing state of women during the transition to motherhood and the necessity of that shift in facilitating infant development.1 Current empirical research in psychology and neuroscience lends support to this preoccupied state of motherhood, affording the opportunity to validate and further refine Winnicott’s notion of preoccupation.2 Coming from a broad perspective of members of the analytic community, Donald Winnicott Today is organized into 3 sections: introducing Winnicott, transitioning to the influence of Winnicott on the work of others, and leading to a more recent examination and consideration of Winnicott’s work. Winnicott’s talks are woven
JOURNAL 702
www.jaacap.org
OF THE
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF C HILD & ADOLESCENT PSYCHIATRY VOLUME 53 NUMBER 6 JUNE 2014