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Reviewing psychoanalytic books began for me as a personal journey after reading paradoxically different views of a book that I had authored in the 1990's. I found it difficult to discern a thread binding one review to another or sometimes even to recognize my own thinking/writing in the mind of a reviewer's hindsight or high-ground which that reviewer's wisdom brought to the conversation. I decided to pen reviews solely as subjective attempts to respectfully enter the author's boat and row a little in their style … at least, as I introjected it in the process of reading. I refused to review books that I couldn't admire. I sought to be a friendly interloper into the labors of another who had spent, at the very least, many months sculpting their ideas … gestating them. Psychoanalysis is, after all and beyond its technical and clinical contributions, a study of and about love.
So it was that I approached Silvano Arieti's next-to-last volume, initially published (Basic Books) shortly before he died in 1981. Reik once said that all love begins with an envy of something the beloved manifests and towards which the lover aspires. I read Arieti's book several times with just such beneficent envy. I felt warmth for the characters and tears for their plight—tears for them and tears for family members lost to Europe's tacit decision to exterminate my people. I approached it—how else?—as a psychoanalyst and as a Jew and as one comfortable with the contributions made by the students of Ferenczi, Sullivan and Fromm-Reichman and their many and varied psychoanalytic kin. For while I trained in the Ego Psychology of the 1950's-1970's, I quickly came to embrace a psychoanalytic approach more consistent with the manner in which I myself viewed attachment and the interpersonal. I, therefore, felt no tension in my reading. To the contrary, I had long since come to admire—dare I say love—this author who embraced an interpersonal view before it was fashionable to do so and who in this writi