The literature of psychoanalysis has been enriched in recent years by a burgeoning of studies addressing matters pertaining to the higher aspects of human nature—matters ethical, religious, and spiritual. The present volume continues this trend, offering us a spate of quite disparate essays on aspects of religious and moral experience. In this regard, the title is somewhat misleading—the theoretical orientation throughout is self psychological and pervasively relational. “Contemporary psychoanalysis” should be understood here to embrace self psychology and the attempt to translate the whole of the analytic canon into relational terms, but in fact there is more to analysis than this renovating and transformative paradigm would allow.

Gargiulo fires an opening salvo against the presumably pernicious concept of an autonomous self, particularly its classic elevation into a therapeutic ideal. The neglected hero of this perspective is Ferenczi, whose understanding of relational need and interdependence would