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“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact,” Shakespeare (1969) observes in A Midsummer Night's Dream: “One sees more devils than vast hell can hold” (p. 169). Dodi Goldman quotes these cautionary words in A Shimmering Landscape: The Imaginative and Actual in Psychic Life to remind us that the imagination is no guarantor of a better life. Yet Goldman argues persuasively that, counterintuitively, Freud neglected to include the imagination in his psychoanalytic theorizing, an omission Goldman is determined to rectify in his new book.
Goldman is a training and supervising analyst and faculty member at the William Alanson White Institute. After completing his doctoral degree in clinical psychology at City College, he was the chief coordinator and clinical interviewer of a multisite epidemiological study of psychiatric disorders. He served as book review editor of Contemporary Psychoanalysis for several years. He is the author of two books: In Search of the Real: The Origins and Originality of D. W. Winnicott (Goldman, 1993b) and A Beholder's Share: Essays on Winnicott and the Psychoanalytic Imagination (Goldman, 2017), which received the 2017 Gradiva Award for Best Book in Psychoanalysis. Goldman (1993a) also edited and wrote an introduction to In One's Bones: The Clinical Genius of D. W. Winnicott.
I never realized before reading A Shimmering Landscape that the word imagination does not appear in the index to the Standard Edition of
Distinguished Teaching Professor, English Department, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, New York; and Honorary Member, American Psychoanalytic Association
Jeffrey Berman, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany NY, 12222
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Freud's writings. How can that be? I wondered. It is true, Goldman concedes, that the German word Phantasie means “imagination,” but the two words have different meanings. Goldman might have pointed out, however, that according t