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In this thoughtful, compelling, and engagingly written book filled with attentive and detailed scholarship, Peter Rudnytsky “examines the interfaces between literature and psychoanalysis …”; it is intended as a “study in intellectual history that maps the origins of contemporary relational theory …” and “articulates [a] “vision of psychoanalysis as a discipline with the unique potential to conjoin science and hermeneutics …” (p. xi). In the seven chapters of its first half Rudnytsky follows stages in the development of the relational model from Freud's early conceptions of psychoanalysis through those defined by the works of the major “disciples” up the point at which he sees the model to have been achieved. The long eighth and ninth chapters that fill the rest of the book cover Groddeck's significant personal and religious influences on psychoanalytic theory formation, and issues relating to the scientific nature and the possible future of psychoanalysis.
Pursuing the origins of the contemporary relational model, Rudnytsky identifies two conflicting trends in psychoanalytic theory. The first traces the gradual weakening of the oedipal paradigm and its replacement by the relational model; the second aims to relate hermeneutic concepts of psychoanalysis to those of the natural, especially biological, sciences. Rudnytsky is not merely a detached observer of historical developments; he seems intent on furthering the consolidation of object-relational models and then the mutual encounter of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. His tone reflects this: occasionally censorious, a bit deprecating, or impatient as he deals with Freud's insistence on the centrality of the oedipal model, on his views of female sexuality, or on the surgical