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When invited to review a highly praiseworthy book, the obvious and economical thing to do is simply praise it. Warren Poland's Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis is a work of psychoanalytic vitality, depth of thought, and humanity expressed with subtlety and clarity.
Its very title tells a tale in its hint of paradox. Paradoxes raise questions and stimulate thought. Inevitably analysts must come to know and understand sympathetically the most intimate details of trauma in their patients' libidinal and aggressive lives, from childhood to maturity, in order to help them resolve their symptoms and blossom in their lives, all the while keeping separate the stream of their own sexual and aggressive needs and wants for satisfaction elsewhere. Intimacy and separateness are fundamental determinants of adequate psychoanalytic work. When they fail, so does analysis. They are also the stuff of life and tragedy. The tragic flaw of Shakespeare's King Lear is his inability to tolerate Cordelia's youthful sexual love for another man. Given the repetition of fixated sexual love and aggression in the maternal, paternal, and sibling transference relations of the analytic situation, an obligation is placed on the analyst to avoid Lear's flaw of appearing to give while unconsciously seeking to possess. This potentially tragic paradox in life and psychoanalysis is explored by Poland from diverse perspectives. If intimacy is required, how is separateness possible? If separateness is required, how is intimacy possible? If both are required by psychoanalysis, is not our profession even more seriously impossible than Freud intended to say when he compared it with teaching and governing? Does not psychoanalysis impose logically contradictory and psychologically conflicting demands on us?
To the tasks imposed by this core issue in psychoanalysis, Poland brings a revealing humanistic attitude. The titles of the sections and chapters convey a playful irony—as in “Opening Conclusions.” It