Psychosomatics Today: A Psychoanalytic Perspective. 2nd Edition. Edited by Marilia Aisenstein and Elsa Rappoport de Aisemberg. London:  Routledge, 2022,  xviii + 194 pp., $170.00 hardcover, $42.95 paperback.

I vividly remember the first time I read about the Paris Psychosomatic School's understanding of psychosomatic patients via their characteristic way of thinking. I encountered it in a short introduction by Marilia Aisenstein and Claude Smadja (2010) to a paper by Pierre Marty (1952), one of the founders of the Psychosomatic School. In describing the cure of a patient with back problems, Marty found

a painful inhibition of thought that, as for back-pain syndromes, he thought of as related to a failure of the dreamwork and therefore of the process of representation itself. Thus it was not a question of looking for the content to give sense to the somatic symptoms but rather of observing the inhibitions or failures of psychic elaboration that precede or accompany them [p. 343].1

This description not only broadened my understanding of a psychic phenomenon I'd been trying to comprehend (i.e., language action), but also

provided what I eventually believed was an essential insight into what is curative in psychoanalysis. For me, the idea of observing the failures of psychic elaboration rather than the content per se opened up new vistas in thinking about a range of patients, both neurotic and nonneurotic.

This is the second edition of Psychosomatics Today, the first edition having been published in 2010. The content is as fresh today as it was then. Three new chapters are provided, all of them clinical in nature. Two are from the editors; the other is from Peter Wegner. Most of the authors include clinical examples that describe their approach to these patients. These are often dramatic, and show the manner in which the writer uses his or her theory in psychoanalytic work. I found Aisenstein's new chapter, “The Allergic Object Relation,” especially enli