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The book's subtitle encapsulates what it is about: a dialogue of practitioners from different schools of thought who are willing to share their theoretical thinking and clinical experience about whether ‘touch’ should be used in the psychoanalytic space. For me, one of the main strengths and interest of the book resides in the different history (cultural and professional) of the authors and their varying approaches to the subject of physical touch in the psychoanalytic space. ‘To touch or not to touch?’ Susie Orbach reminds us in her foreword. This is the question the book explores in different ways. Differences which, yet again, highlight how rich and stimulating, but also how challenging, dialoguing between different approaches can be for all who practice in the field of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
I found the Touch Papers a reader-friendly volume, something worth noting, I think, in psychoanalytic literature. The book is carefully put together: first with a short biography of each of its thirteen contributors (including that of the book's editor, Graeme Galton); secondly, with a foreword by Susie Orbach, which sets the scene by sketching out how the idea of considering a book on the subject of touch in the psychoanalytic space came about and what an important step this is; finally, with an introduction by Graeme Galton, which explores the psychoanalytic viewpoint ‘that touching a patient serves either to relieve the anxiety of the patient or therapist and does not promote psychic change, or, at worst, leads to sexual relations between therapist and patient’. The introduction also allows Galton to brush an overview of some of the