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As its title suggests, Esther Rashkin's new book is in many ways a sequel to Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (1992). Like her earlier work, Unspeakable Secrets draws heavily on the pathbreaking theories of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1987). For many in the English-speaking world, Rashkin's first book was a wonderfully lucid introduction to the French psychoanalysts' theory of the phantom. In it she not only explains how a phantom is formed when a shameful, unspeakable secret is unwittingly transmitted, through cryptic language and behavior, transgenerationally from one family member to another, but also brilliantly demonstrates through meticulous close readings of French, English, and American texts the productiveness of this new approach for the study of narrative literature.
While the first book was addressed primarily to academic literary critics, Rashkin—now a practicing psychotherapist as well as a professor of literary and cultural studies—has written Unspeakable Secrets for a broader audience. This highly ambitious new work seeks to make a greater place for psychoanalysis within the field of cultural studies, endeavoring to show how the uncovering of unspeakable, potentially pathogenic secrets may reveal powerful and too-often-overlooked engagements between works of literature and film and specific cultural and ideological constellations. But being equally mindful of her readers who are mental health professionals, Rashkin is concerned throughout with the therapeutic implications of her analyses.
With regard to cultural studies, the book takes issue with a number of recent trends. As Rashkin writes:
Scholarship's intensive exploration of all dimensions of cultural production during the last fifteen years has dealt with psychoanalysis in only two ways: either it has
Page 383ignored it (as a glance at cultural studies journal contents, anthologies and conference programs reveals); or it has understood psychoanalysis to mean Freudian and Lacanian