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For most readers this posthumously published collection of fourteen essays will likely be a first introduction to the work of Jean-Georges Schimek, an extraordinary psychoanalytic scholar and theoretician. Schimek's talent is to trace the evolution of such fundamental Freudian constructs as psychic reality, unconscious fantasy, unconscious representation, and transference and to discern the many ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions that are the inevitable accompaniment of Freud's fecundity. His critique of Freud is presented in such a manner that the theoretical and clinical dilemmas he explores can be brought into discourse with the same issues extant in current psychoanalytic theoretical debate.
The essays collected here originally appeared between 1964 and 2000. Five were published between 1973 and 1987, and several others were presentations to the Rapaport-Klein Study Group, of which he was a member. The final chapter, a superb exegesis of The Interpretation of Dreams, was not published in his lifetime, due to his concern that the questions he raised about Freud's conception of unconscious fantasy might be used by Freud bashers claiming that Freud had distorted the data of childhood seduction to fit his theory.
Entering this text, we hear the influence of Schimek's mentors and contemporaries, especially Erikson, whom he first encountered at Berkeley and subsequently followed to Austen Riggs, where he was a psychology fellow from 1956 to 1959. Given the richness and originality of his approach to theory and the company he kept, it is surprising that Schimek is not better known or more quoted in the literature, especially