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.
Alan Bass's newest book, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care, is a companion to his previous work, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros . While the earlier work was written “with an audience of psychoanalytic clinicians in mind,” Interpretation and Difference is “more specifically philosophical” (p. ix). Despite this distinction, Bass tells us in his introduction that the “two books are really one” (p. ix); this is an important point, because it leads us to the heart of Bass's project. In Difference and Disavowal Bass set out to explore what he considers a conundrum for clinical psychoanalysis, apparently analyzable patients who resist interpretation. In that work he allows that deconstructive thought is the means by which to shed light on this problem. In Interpretation and Difference he uses this clinical argument to engage the philosophers (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida) and issues that underlie his reevaluation and revision of Freud. In this way, Bass's project is original, bold, and important both on its own terms and as a bridge between practicing psychoanalysts and contemporary theorists. To his credit, Bass manages to provide a sure path for both constituencies, though the terrain is difficult and Interpretation and Difference is by no means an easy read. I will return to this point. In essence, Bass is attempting to provide a practical therapeutic application for the thought of some of the more abstruse thinkers of the last 150 years. It is a testament to the author that the book succeeds on both the philosophical and the clinical level.
Interpretation and Difference begins by articulating the problem of the “concrete” (i.e., literal-minded) patient whose resistance to interpretation lights up the problem of interpretation in Freud and what Bass sees as some of the shortcomings of practicing analysts. For Bass this is a limit case and the patient's impasse is really an issue about how we