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.
A mid the swirling issues of the day, we can too easily lose track of what—in the lengthening history of psychoanalysis—remains vital over time. As our ongoing series of reviews of Winnicott's Collected Works shows,1 analysts writing decades ago can seem prescient; we may, in our zeal to build toward the future, overlook the groundwork they have laid. Like a well-loved novel, a psychoanalytic text yields new meanings as a reader matures.
In this issue of JAPA Review of Books, we present “Classics Re-Viewed”—a new, occasional feature in which we explore the enduring influence of classic works. We are delighted to inaugurate this series with a stellar exemplar of the form: Michael Parsons's essay on Enid Balint's Before I Was I: Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. For Parsons, the project is richly resonant; “Enid,” he writes, “was an important figure for me personally in my psychoanalytic life.” Balint supervised Parsons's first training case and, together, he and Juliet Mitchell helped Balint edit the collection of papers the book comprises. Here, from the perspective of twenty-eight years after its publication, Parsons takes stock of Balint's influence—some of it long unconscious, and seen only in retrospect—on his development as a psychoanalyst. He also appraises Balint's contributions with a contemporary eye, finding much that is of enduring value (and an occasional mar, perhaps not visible at the time with the tools then available to Balint).
In Jessica Benjamin's Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity, and the Third, reviewer Luis Ripoll finds a “creative