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Dana Amir's Psychoanalysis as Radical Hospitality opens the boundaries of intersubjective life with a conceptually compelling vocabulary that can hold the lyrical movements of reading and writing as a psychoanalyst. Amir contributed four earlier volumes in Donnel Stern's series Psychoanalysis in a New Key, including Cleft Tongue (Amir 2014), On the Lyricism of the Mind (Amir 2015), Bearing Witness to the Witness (Amir 2018), and Psychoanalysis on the Verge of Language (Amir 2021). Amir's most recent book details entwined expressions of self/other relations as met in the clinic, memoir, literature, critical theory, motherhood, voice, and the open field of speech. Deep attention is given to the contingencies of historical consciousness.
Orphanages , the evocative cover image by David Wakstein, signifies the psychoanalytic dilemmas Amir takes to heart: the soundings of loss of home, the uncertainties of waiting to be found, and the bare hope for holding. The vicissitudes of loss and finding and their movements of listening and language serve as relational motifs and are considered the stuff of perspectives. As allegories, turning-to versus turning-away are resplendent in likeness and difference. One dimension involves creating the ethical bonds of Winnicottian holding and the Bionian reverie, while another dimension carries on the dissonance of a Kleinian logic of the vicious circle and a Bionian deadlock of attacks on linking. A third dimension is poetical, akin to the alchemy of sensate life described by the French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle (2018) as beyond the confines “that suffuses the real with light” (p. 87). Amir's current volume has an eye to possible worlds that may emerge from impossible places, a metaphor for psychoanalysis today and an allegory for these difficult times.