You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Isaiah Berlin (1953) famously wrote, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing …” (p. 1). Somewhat playfully he suggested that writers and thinkers either try to build one unified way of looking at the world, or else they are content to see a lot of different things without cohering them into a vision. One might say the same thing about readers. Do we look for that one big truth that puts together a vision, or are we content with several interesting truths? To me, David Black's book is a hedgehog in that it has one central idea, that is to expand the frame of psychoanalysis and to give it an ethical foundation; not an ethics that is instrumentalist, but one that has deep philosophic foundations. His poetic sensibility couples with his philosophic mastery and brings both to reflect on ways in which ethics can converse with psychoanalysis. Being able to view it from different vertices, including Dante and Buddhism, makes this book a rich and freely associative meditation on the subject. The texture of writing is reminiscent of the tradition of history of ideas. It takes you back to the writings of men like Isaiah Berlin, Bernard Williams and closer to home, Hans Loewald.
The way he angles his camera gives us a panoramic, rather than a microscopic view. He begins by looking at how the “triumphs of science” (p. 9) in the nineteenth century created a profound division within philosophy. One strand pointed to logical positivism, which accepted that only scientific findings can be the basis of truth. This included a turning away from religion and idealism. But Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, and Husserl all pointed–in different ways–to the limitations of logical positivism. Black places Freud as addressing the empirical scientific temper of the age, but for obvious reasons, does not place him within logical positivistic thinking. In fact, Freud's position as powerfully subjective, as well as objective truth seeker, becomes an apt beginning to the questio