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David Liberman, a highly esteemed Argentinean analyst and pioneer of South American psychoanalysis, worked and published extensively throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He was best known within his circle in the River Plate group, which included his teacher and analyst Enrique Pichon-Riviere and colleagues Marie Langer, León Grinberg, and Willy and Madeleine Baranger. The fertility of this group is by now legendary, and the influence of this intellectual and cultural milieu on Liberman's thinking is evident in Communication in Session: The Contributions of David Liberman to Psychoanalysis.
The book is an interesting, yet challenging, read. As has been noted by many who knew and worked with him, including the authors, Eduardo Issaharoff and Benzión Winograd, Liberman's ouevre is not as widely referenced outside of South America as it should be, in part because of the work's difficulty. Hence this book, which for the authors is an homage to a man they consider one of their psychoanalytic masters, is also an attempt at demystifying his ideas by applying them to contemporary problems.
For this, Issaharoff and Winograd divide their book into two parts, each very different. In the first they attempt an exegesis of their understanding of Liberman's contributions, while laying out its methodological, clinical, theoretical, and diagnostic implications. In the second part, by contrast, they present a carefully selected collection of previously published articles by South American analysts, including but not limited to the authors and Liberman himself. All but one of these papers appear to have been presented publicly to psychoanalytic audiences and include discussion with such prominent interlocutors as Willy Baranger, Janine Puget, and Gregorio Klimovsky. As the first part is devoted largely to the authors' synthesis of Liberman's work, I will devote most of my review to it, admitting at the outset that I will not be able to do justice to Issaharoff and Winograd's considerable