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It is always valuable to read a book that is not consonant with one's way of conceptualizing psychoanalytic material. In fact, learning about a different point of view can stimulate a reader's ability to critically approach the strengths and weaknesses of his or her own perspective. In this case, the book under review has propelled me to research further the concepts of “inner space” and “inner genital.”
In this volume, Marita Torsti-Hagman, a Finnish psychoanalyst, presents a series of papers, most previously published. Focusing on the fundamentals of free association, for both patient and analyst, she writes about hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and the death drive. However, the one overriding theme of the book is the role of inner genitality in feminine psychology.
To understand Torsti-Hagman's general psychoanalytic perspective, one should peruse the three chapters in the middle of the book: “Quo Vadis Psychoanalysis?” “A Psychoanalysis Which Seeks Popularity Is a Lost Psychoanalysis,” and “André Green and the Dead Mother.” She argues that “the emphasis on a ‘scientific’ perspective … may lead to the loss of the very heart of psychoanalysis” (p. 71) because the scientific “model is totally inappropriate to the analytical way of thinking” (p. 78). Using André Green as her model (her ego ideal, I would say), Torsti-Hagman maintains that “psychoanalytic theory unfolds neither through logical understanding nor study, but through reading with our analytic tool, free association, through understanding and through interpreting our reading experience” (p. 80).
Overall, I wonder whether this approach leads Torsti-Hagman to assume too often that her conjectures and inferences about a patient's unconscious mental life are veridical. This is my main critique of the volume's perspective. Unquestionably as one reads another's clinical, theoretical, or scientific work, one has a series of associations that more