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Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.
It is hard to be writing.
I am having a hard time writing this review.
It is equally hard to write, instead of a review, a commentary-essay about these two books, though it would be absolutely impossible if I had to do it in any usual way. (I am too far past my “use by” date to do that.) Let me explain … or … you may prefer to stop reading right now.
If my increasingly porous memory serves me, it was August 2020 when I responded to a Books Available for Review email and requested to take on both of these volumes. My appreciation of John Gedo had been forged from a prickly set of misfirings almost thirty years ago (and alluded to in one of the papers here collected, “More on the affectivity of the analyst,” in The Languages of Psychoanalysis, pp. 102-113) that, improbably, bloomed into a comradeship of multiple affinities that would grow to include a book review (Vida, 2001), professional acquaintance, and some exchanges of personal confidences and support. We had lost touch in recent years, despite a chance encounter at a chamber music concert in Southern California where he seemed to have relocated in retirement. When I saw these two books on the list, reissued paperback collections of papers previously published long ago ( and ), I wondered, “why now?” Is this a pseudo-festschrift to mark the approach of a laudable year? Or, more sadly, a posthumous acknowledgment of his indelible footprint and long shadow on the contemporary field of psychoanalysis?1 My efforts to find out through the Internet were maddeningly inconclusive. On Google, I could find no obituary or death notice, except the snippet of a single line from a presumed colleague referring to his having passed away in mid-2017. On Amazon, among all the listings of his many books (twenty in all, including two other recent paperbound collections of much earlier papers), is given a date of birth