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In The Transforming Self: New Dimensions in Psychoanalytic Process David Shainberg has invited the reader to engage in a dialogue. I intend to respond. G. Wilson Knight has said that criticism is a judgement of vision. This is to be a critique rather than a review, the latter being, in my understanding, primarily interpretative. One reviewer (Silvano Arieti in The Academy) has called this book “an unusually worthwhile essay.” It is indeed that, in the large sense of essay. It is an attempt by Dr. Shainberg to accomplish what R. D. Laing states as his objective in The Politics of Experience when he says, “The truth I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it.”
This is not a topical book in that the contemporary feminist revolution is never mentioned, nor is reference made to the man/woman distinction. Topical in a deeper way, it is part of a development in psychoanalysis that moves toward an abrogation of analysis. This development is consistent with the awareness in all the sciences that process and energy are the ground of all nature. The formula E = mc2 reflects the relationship between mass and energy, but the trend in the sciences of humanity appears to minimize the mc2 part of the equation. Heraclitus’ thought, that one cannot step into the same river twice, has been remembered, but his recognition of “harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the bow and the lyre” has often been ignored.
My central argument hinges on Dr. Shainberg's introductory statement, which is the thesis of the book: “… it should be clear that, as ontology recapitulates phylogeny, the process of each new development repeats the overall process of development, and points the way to future development.” This is not so if we accept individuation, the occurrence of a unique being. It is the touchstone of biology, it is emphatically not the key to psychology. And yet this book purports to be psychology, to be concerned with the human being qua human being. Einstein has said that