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.
Whenever a group of analysts share in the common task of considering an author's work—as is the case with this volume—the editors can never be sure whether the invited commentators will stick to the task at hand or take the opportunity to speak about vaguely related matters that largely take leave of the considered work. This brings to mind the parable of the elephant and the flea—relayed to me by Joe Lichtenberg at a recent ApsaA meeting—which aptly captures what sometimes happens after a paper is delivered and the analyst chosen to comment delivers a discussion that fails to grapple with the author's chief arguments:
A biologist was asked to discuss a paper about elephants. His area of expertise is insects, not mammals. He began: “The elephant is a very large animal with a long trunk and floppy ears. He is sometimes irritatingly beset upon by fleas. Now fleas are a small insect that …”
This edited volume contains the reactions of ten well-chosen, theoretically and geographically diverse analysts, all of them highly knowledgeable about the subject matter: Freud's remarkably brief foundational paper “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” As one might expect, some of the contributors have written chapters that touch only tangentially on Freud's paper on their way to addressing what chiefly interests them (their “fleas”). I'm not saying these chapters aren't well-written and worth reading; rather, I am simply noting the regularity of such occurrences, which typically plague efforts of this sort.
The book is masterfully edited by Gabriela Legorreta and Lawrence J. Brown, who together have culled an international chorus of voices