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Interdisciplinarity is widely praised but hard to practice. In the hands of an autodidact, it can be both alluring and treacherous, at least professionally. Established scholars do not, on principle, wish a discipline to remain within narrow confines. However, standards of assessment and consensus tend to erode with frequent crossings of academic borders. If this is combined with idiosyncrasy—the word at its root means “one's own mixing together” (idios-synkrasis)—then a scholar may, even if otherwise recognized and feted, achieve a kind of invisibility. It is hard to see that which, by training, reinforcement, and inclination, one has accustomed oneself to overlook. This narrowing phenomenon can affect all disciplines, psychoanalysis included. Indeed, a case could be made that the very fluidity of psychoanalytic teaching necessitates a firmness of intellectual boundaries. Nevertheless, where there are boundaries there are also transgressions, and not all transgressions must be noisy attempts to shock or undermine. A theorist may simply travel an eccentric path, this last adjective meaning not “odd” but (from an established perspective) “out of center” (ex-kentron). Such a thinker was Swiss-American psychoanalyst, Léon Wurmser (1931-2020), who kept to an analytic, indeed austerely Freudian, orbit yet managed to steer a wide-ranging trajectory of his own, one that—should we wish it—might reverberate in our own age.
At the time of his death, Wurmser, in addition to more than a half-century of analytic and therapeutic work, had published over 20 books as author or editor, as well as 300 scholarly articles
and reviews. Practically all were in the field of psychoanalysis, albeit a very broadly defined psychoanalysis, incorporating a myriad of perspectives. Because of this tremendous productivity, there is little immediate danger that Wurmser's works will simply vanish from the record. Yet there is a danger that the passage of time will crowd Wurmser out of