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Jon Mills' latest book is one, if not the most, fascinating and erudite presentation on the subject of the relation of psychoanalysis and philosophy known to this reviewer. Mills is very well equipped being a professional philosopher and psychoanalyst. It is by no means an easy book to follow. Mills makes every attempt to define the issues both within the text and in the footnotes that he is most concerned to treat. There is enough for the general reader and more for those who follow the argument professionally. The vastness of the book, however, precludes any detailed critical exposition. This would require an article if not a book in itself. I have therefore chosen to quote the author directly whenever feasible. My hope in this review is therefore to convey not the essence of the book but its flavor. Each reader will have to decide for him- or herself the benefits it hopes to derive, consistent with their own interests. This reviewer personally found Mills' book a page turner.
Mills sees the future of psychoanalysis embedded in our cultural philosophical past that he finds in the work of Hegel. Mills hopes “to stimulate a conceptual shift in our understanding of several key psychoanalytic tenets—from classical metapsychology to contemporary intersubjectivity theory—by systematically introducing process dialectical thought” (p. 37). While in modern times Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Marx all employed dialectical formulations in one way or another in their philosophy, Mills is committed to a version forged in the manner of Hegel with some revision. The philosophical foundation that Mills finds conducive to his desideratum is one “derived from Hegel's dialectical logic” (p. 4). In Mills' hands, the Hegelian perspective is sheared of its “non-relevant and/or incomprehensible to psychoanalytic sensibility, in order to appreciate his science of the dialectic and logical operations in which it unfolds. The adoption of his dialectical method may complement or augment