From the Editors

In this issue of JAPA Review of Books, we are pleased to join guest editors Phillip Blumberg and Adrienne Harris in presenting the eighth review in our series on The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott. In “The Place Where We Live: Inside, Outside, Playing and Using in Perpetuity,” Steven Cooper offers his reading of Volume 8. Cooper notes Winnicott's “major theoretical revision of Freud's and Klein's views on aggression.” But as the title of his essay suggests, Cooper's focus is on Winnicott's view of “playing as therapeutic action.” An important contemporary theorist who makes innovative use of Winnicott in his own writing about creativity, Cooper emphasizes how “themes of playing and using the object” mingle with “ideas about interpretation and culture” in each of several seminal papers published during 1967-1968, the short period covered by this volume.

Elaboration of the Unconscious

In an in-depth, thoughtful, and elegant book essay spotlighting Avner Bergstein's Bion and Meltzer s Expeditions into Unmapped Mental Life , Howard Levine takes the reader through a complex expansion and elaboration of the unconscious to include “the unrepresented and unrepresentable and the implications of this expansion for analytic theory and technique.” Levine's discussion of the book addresses what Bergstein calls “an unmapped” area of the mind, that is, “an inaccessible state of mind, something unconscious ‘that has never been anything else, never been conscious.’” He goes on to explain that “this area is different from the dynamic unconscious and behaves according to a set of rules and parameters ditfer-ent from those we use to conceptualize the normal-neurotic sector of the psyche.” Levine considers Bergstein's elaboration of the unconscious “one of the most accessible and immediately useful iterations” of contemporary

writings that “open up and extend psychoanalytic theory, understanding, and practice to a whole ra