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Though there are many good, insightful moments in this collection of papers by Australasian psychoanalyst Paul Schimmel, I found it an uneven book. This impression is unfortunately reinforced by some rather sloppy, inconsistent editorship, particularly regarding the way citations are made in the text. The title itself is already something of an oddity: why must the subtitle include ‘of Paul Schimmel’ when his name already appears as the author of the volume?
A poet in his own right, Schimmel begins with a poem about Freud's 39th birthday. He then introduces the book with little more than a listing of the papers in his collection. These appear to have been written over a period of about 20 years but are not presented chronologically. He concludes with an equally brief tribute to Neville Symington, who emigrated from the UK to pursue his maverick, idiosyncratic brand of psychoanalysis in the perhaps more conducive setting of Australia,
and whose extensive influence on the author is evident throughout the book and gratefully acknowledged as such.
The opening piece, ‘An elegy for mourning and “subjecticide”’, which begins with Schimmel's accidental killing of a bird while driving through France, is a moving meditation on loss, mourning and the failure to mourn, filtered through the papers that Freud wrote on these issues during the years of the First World War: ‘Thoughts for the time on war and death’ , ‘On transience’ and ‘Mourning and melancholia’ . Schimmel's frequent and effective use of literature is already evident here, as he cites not only the romantic poets Coleridge and Keats but also contemporary novelist Jonathan Franzen. The evocative term ‘subjecticide’, moreover, is a coinage borrowed from the literary lexicon of transatlantic psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas.
In the second, more clinically based paper, Schimmel bemoans the overuse in psychiatry of what Melanie Klein calls the manic defence. He claims that resorting to rapid diagnoses, followed hard upo