The Subversive Edge of Psychoanalysis. By David James Fisher. New York:  Routledge, 2024,  260 pp., paperback $34.39.

As analytic therapists, we are daily exposed to myriad experiences—the patient's and ours. We hear a tantalizing piece of information, a fragment of narrative; at another moment, we are flooded with affect, and at the best times, there is a coming together of affect, understanding, and relatedness. When I'm asked, “How do you do this work year after year?” I often answer, “I get to sit all day and listen to stories and be part of them.” The innocent psychoanalytic office is the scene of endlessly varied dramas. And from the earliest writing of Freud, this same sensibility can be applied to experience outside the office. We are among the few generalists that remain. The breadth of psychoanalysis is potentially one of its great contributions to community life. Because we are constrained by confidentiality, this richness is rarely shown. Alternatively, it can be demonstrated through sensitive application to other realms.

Applied analytic thinkers have a wide range. In an era of superspecialization, analysts can meaningfully pursue subjects from neurobiology to politics to the humanities. David Fisher exemplifies this breadth. In this volume of reviews, memoirs, interviews, and original papers, he organizes disparate subjects under the idea of psychoanalysis as subversive. From the title, I expected Fisher to take on shibboleths of our field, or to use psychoanalysis as a radical perspective on issues and assumptions in other realms. Not the case; Fisher's “subversive” is more nuanced, mining a rich lode of subject matter with the special perspective of a historian-analyst. He is referring to the way psychoanalytic thinking so regularly challenges the obvious, the taken-for-granted. The volume demonstrates this by including a wide diversity of subjects, describing and

exploring them from a personal and psychoanalytically informed vantage. If anything, Fisher is