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Anne C. Dailey, Evangeline Starr Professor of Law at University of Connecticutt Law School, where she has taught since 1990, is no stranger to psychoanalysis. She has been Erikson Scholar-in-Residence at the Austen Riggs Center and is currently Academic Associate at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. In 2002 she received the CORST prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for the best interdisciplinary essay; her paper, “Developmental Perspectives on the Ideal of Reason in American Constitutional Law” (Dailey 2007a), was subsequently published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. In 2007 she edited an issue of American Imago (see Dailey 2007b) devoted to the convergence of psychoanalysis and law. Her new book, Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, received the American Psychoanalytic Association's 2018 Courage to Dream Book Prize, an honor it richly deserves.
Law and the Unconscious shows how psychoanalysis grounded in clinical work can infuse the law with the reality of psychological experience. Dailey's book demonstrates the best of interdisciplinary scholarship, where two disparate professions, in this case, law and psychoanalysis, each with a long history of separate traditions and assumptions, can enrich and be enriched by the other, without one discipline colonizing the other. To change metaphors, the best interdisciplinary scholarship can result in a fruitful cross-pollination.
Decades ago, there was a keen interest in using psychoanalytic insights in legal scholarship and practice, but psychoanalysis fell out of favor, and now seldom enters law school discussions or courtrooms. This is unfortunate, for, as Dailey contends, the law's failure to understand human subjectivity poses grave risks for a system of justice committed to