In Defense of Metapsychology? The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Edited by Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing. Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2019,  777 pp., $200 hardcover.

Full disclosure: I write this review with a strong bias in favor of studying and highlighting the importance of the overlap between philosophy and psychoanalysis, particularly in the context of institutional psychoanalysis (I come back to this “bias” further later in the review). It was with enthusiasm that I embarked on reading and reviewing this handbook, edited by Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing. Indeed, it fully merits its Handbook title, and the qualifiers, such as masterful and monumental, that come to mind when describing this work. With 42 chapters, 35 contributors, and eight subsections, the book covers the intersection between philosophy and psychoanalysis from two perspectives.

Gipps and Lacewing explain these perspectives in their overall introduction and section introductions to help situate this interdisciplinary field for readers from different intellectual backgrounds. Of the two perspectives, the first is historical: Section 1 examines the philosophical precursors of foundational psychoanalytic concepts, such as libido, intersubjectivity, and sublimation in the works of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Section 2 explores direct 20th-century engagements of psychoanalysis by philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Marx via the Frankfurt School. The second perspective, found in the latter six sections, is topical and covers domains such as aesthetics, clinical theory, religion, phenomenology and science, ethics, and politics and society.

When I use the descriptor “masterful,” this should not be understood in the sense that Gipps and Lacewing have mastered this immense

domain. Indeed, they explicitly acknowledge the “limitations in coverage” (p. 17) of the book. When I use the descriptor “monumental,” the book should not be unders