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This book is about the way psychoanalysis and its understanding of psychic life is distinctive but inseparable from the interpersonal and social sphere. Not only is the relationship between the social world and psychic life an important area to conceptualize and explore, but the existence of this interrelationship can draw attention to the limited horizons propagated by forms of psychoanalytic thinking.
Shmuel Erlich's book is a contribution towards expansion in frame, so that psychoanalysis as a discipline can be freer to engage in relational social fields of thought, take on more social political and worldly concerns as its focus, and challenge restrictions as to its considered areas of interest and relevance.
As the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is a fascination with thinking and living on the border zone, which encompasses consideration of psychoanalysis as a frontier discipline, its interface with other disciplines, and with understanding ‘the other side’, the ‘enemy’ or the mind of the ‘terrorist’. As destructiveness becomes the focus, it dawns on the reader that the book is concerned with a border straddled across a potential war zone. This is no surprise since Shmuel Erlich is a practising Jewish psychoanalyst living on the border of Israel and Arab states.
The book is a compilation of different papers which makes for a varied read, but there is a continuity of themes throughout. Shmuel Erlich is open to social forms of explanation, showing how cultural beliefs can shape thought and action, whilst also retaining a specificity to his psychoanalytic stance. The key themes I would sum up as: the relation of inner and outer reality; a critical exploration of the psychoanalytic defensive position of looking inward, the defensive connection of Freud to his Jewish identity, an examination of conflict with the ‘enemy’; a relation with ‘otherness’ and difference. The experience of living on a potential war zone and practising psychoanalysis