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Peter L. Rudnytsky's Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision makes for engaging reading. In the hands of Rudnytsky, the texts of Freud, Stekel, Ferenczi, Jung, Winnicott and Coltart take on an added dimension of meaning by their integration with the formative events of the authors' personal life. Psychoanalytic texts are not the only ones that benefit from Rudnytsky's insights. He unabashedly upholds the effacement of the distinction between clinical and applied analysis. “I cannot agree” he tells us “with those who draw a sharp distinction between clinical work and what is often referred to as ‘applied’ analysis” (pp. 123-124). His deconstruction of this binary opposition opens a space that allows him to “reconstruct” a bridge that connects the author's text to his or her living experiences, real, imaginary or unconscious.
Rudnytsky cites a description of an analytic encounter between Nina Coltart [a British independent analyst of whom he says that “there is no one whom I would rather have had as my analyst than Nina Coltart” (p. 100)] and her patient that can also characterize his approach to bridging the divide between the meaning of the text and its isomorphic root in the authors' life experiences. “[The] very language ‘gave the game away’ over and over again—though he remained unable to hear the double meaning in his own words—and in whose estimation ‘it was as if his secondary processes had peeled away and we were face to face with the language of primary process’” (p. 2).
While Rudnytsky's bridge from the text to the authors' living experiences places him in what may be described as the postmodern era of existential phenomenology, he, unlike some others, views psychoanalysis as having roots in science as well as hermeneutics. In the appendix to the book entitled “‘Nitty-gritty issues’: an interview with Eric Kandel”, Rudnytsky (p. 161) summarizes Kandel's view of the relation of science to psychoanalysis as follows: “So, in the same way