From the Editors

If there is a theme that runs through this issue of the Review of Books, it is about the richness, intricacies, and surprises contained within a text. To read is to be willing to immerse ourselves within the pages, and experience the pleasure of a new idea revealed or a familiar one revised. Sometimes we can barely resist the urge to toss the pages aside in scorn or derision, decrying what we disagree with or despairing over the great divide between the words in the text and the ideas we hold most dear. In the pieces you find here, our reviewers have taken up a broad selection of books in ways that are unexpected, nuanced, multilayered, and thought-provoking.

This collection of reviews—from essays about the original psychoanalytic thinkers, the historical figures of psychoanalysis, to reflections of essayists, poets, memoirists and graphic novelists, to essays about the trauma of personal, communal and global grief and despair, to the history of mankind and the history of the individual, to the mind, its biology and neurology, to adult development to the development of psychosis, to reflections on the process and the meaning of writing itself—brings into sharp relief the extraordinary depth and breadth of psychoanalytic thought. We hope you will discover pieces that speak to you, move you, surprise you, and engage you in dialogue with our authors.

The first essay in our Book Essays section is a unique offering. We are delighted to bring to our pages a distinctive translation of Dr. Helí Morales's paper “Uncovered Violence: Feminicide and Cruelty Beneath the Open Sky: Beloved Mexico, So Beautiful, yet So Wounded,” with a special introduction by Mina Levinsky-Wohl and Gabriela Legorreta.

Dr. Morales, who was awarded the Sigourney Prize in 2020, “earned acknowledgment for his innovative approach in conceptualizing the emotional su