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.
This issue of JAPA Review of Books begins with the fourth installment in a series of reviews of The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott, curated by guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris. In his review of Volume 5, Emanual Berman presents “a tale of two Winnicotts”—the “daring and original revolutionary” Winnicott, and the loyalist to classical psychoanalysis. We expect that you'll find Berman's writing as engaging as the works it covers, from the years 1955-1959.
“Never forget” is an oft-repeated invocation of the Holocaust, spoken in part as precaution, in part as prayer. In our present context—pandemic-driven isolation and loss, a long-due reckoning with racial and caste injustices, and a rise of violence against minority groups—a deep look at the Holocaust, through the eyes of those who remember it or whose memories have been shaped in its shadow, has vivid and poignant resonance. In a review of Ira Brenner's Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies, Nathan Szajnberg writes from the perspective of one whose very existence beats the odds. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, Szajnberg invites the reader to hear the voices of the psychoanalyst-authors of this edited volume, “who have pursued examined lives” and “speak from an informed heart.” Highlighting several of the chapters in Brenner's Handbook, Szajnberg focuses particularly on a section addressing the question of how to understand the Nazi mind, and the extreme conditions under which moral rules are shattered. Of the contributors to this volume, Szajnberg writes, “we should thank them for their candor, thoughtfulness, and their wish to help us understand the unspeakable.”
Psychoanalysis today is called to step beyond the confines of the consulting room and turn its discerning eye to the plagues that confront us daily: war and strife, trauma and violence, disease and protection from it,