Three Books on the Grounding Principles and Techniques of Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalysis beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking towards the Post-Relational. By Robin S. Brown. New York:  Routledge, 2017,  x + 132 pp., $190.00 hardcover, $59.25 paperback. Of Things Invisible to Mortal Sight: Celebrating the Work of James S. Grotstein. Edited by Annie Reiner. London:  Karnac Books, 2017,  xxiv + 279 pp., $48.95 paperback. Relational Freedom: Emergent Properties of the Interpersonal Field. By Donnel B. Stern. London:  Routledge, 2015,  xvi + 256 pp., $175.00 hardcover, $47.95 paperback.

Taken together, these three books cover a wide swath of the history of psychoanalytic ideas and technique. More than that, they address the fundamental principles of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, with attention to the nuanced details involved. The books separately and collectively challenge the reader to question and think about the very foundations of psychoanalysis, as well as its everyday practice, together with the ethical concerns that go along with them. The three books convey the importance, indeed the urgency, of the theoretical and clinical issues facing contemporary psychoanalysis.

Robin Brown, in Psychoanalysis beyond the End of Metaphysics: Thinking towards the Post-Relational, canvasses, in an impressively small number of pages and in sentences at times perhaps too condensed, both a large amount of Western philosophy and the history of modern psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In so doing, Brown outlines basic metaphysical and ethical challenges for psychoanalysis in the current setting. In Of Things Invisible to Mortal Sight, Annie Reiner presents an edited