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Janice Lieberman's central thesis in this collection of her writings from 1991 to 2018 is that social reality, though routinely omitted from clinical formulations, can profoundly affect the intrapsychic and shape character. In her introduction, “Loss of Integrity in Contemporary Culture and Contemporary Psyche,” she asks how changes in social reality have impacted her patients and herself in her more than forty years of providing psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in private practice. In keeping with her training as both a psychoanalyst and a social psychologist, she cites, inter alia, changes in the job market, gay rights, gender, and technology that have affected the definition of “the family,” the ways we communicate, and the pursuit of politics, relationships, and entertainment.
Whereas in her 2000 book, Body Talk: Looking and Being Looked at in Psychotherapy (two chapters of which are included here), she encouraged psychoanalysts to recognize the important role of vision in psychoanalytic treatment as “listening's twin” (p. 279), here she urges they pay attention to changes in their patients' moral sensibilities. As the book was completed shortly after the election of Donald Trump, its focus on morals might seem a reaction to the recent social, political, and ethical currents that he exploits, among them greed and the freedom to lie without consequence. Yet Lieberman asserts that such values and practices are not new; indeed, she has been writing about them for twenty-five years and more.
In this book Lieberman has organized some of her publications and presentations under three headings: Superego/Character Issues; Body, Skin, and Gender; and Relationships. A fourth section treats the reflection of these themes in works of art (she also works as a docent at the Whitney