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Once in a while, I come across a book that I long to read out loud, one sentence at a time, in the company of a fellow reader, someone who speaks a similar language, so the reading aloud becomes an extension of conversation into mutual poetry. The prototype of such a book for me was S!ándor Ferenczi's Clinical Diary (1988), and the earliest “fellow readers” were colleagues.1 A later example was Michael Krüger's The End of the Novel (1990), followed by José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), and David Grossman's Be My Knife (1998). Each of these books, introspective to a degree that renders inoperative the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, is densely evocative for me. All of them I have read in translation. The Ferenczi is notable for belonging (recently and idiosyncratically) to the canon of psychoanalytic writing.
“Throughout the nineteenth century …
To this small list I now add a second directly psychoanalytic referent, Meira Likierman's Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context, and this is as much for how it is written as for its content. In fact, the present review essay began as a desire to characterize that “how,” a “how” that is a transcendent embodiment