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The word essay comes from its equivalent in French, essai, which means quite literally "a try." In this sense, Stanley Leavy's The Psychoanalytic Dialogue is an essay at its best. It is an attempt to confront more than 20 years of the author's clinical experience and to articulate its meaning. It is an effort to integrate the range of intellectual influences, from F. de Saussure and M. Heidegger to P. Ricoeur and J. Lacan, which have shaped his thought. Leavy avails himself of the reader's attention to provide an opportunity similar to the one he believes to be at the heart of the psychoanalytic situation: to put into words that "yet-to-be-spoken statement" which exists prior to speech, so that desire and intention can be deciphered. To find the right words to say what you mean to a "hearer" is the condition of dialogue. Through dialogue, and dialogue alone, can meaning be disclosed.
American psychoanalysis owes Stanley Leavy a debt of gratitude. His interest in linguistics and linguistic models of psychoanalysis has sown a literature which otherwise might have been somewhat barren in this area. In addition to a wealth of work on Lacan, he has written on C. Pierce, F. de Saussure, and N. Chomsky; on V. Rosen, M. Edelson, and R. Schafer. And when he writes, Leavy struggles to locate these authors within a larger historical and philosophical picture, reminding psychoanalysts that our field's parturition did not