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This book was such an unsettling read that recommending it is difficult, at least with any sort of genuine enthusiasm. Initially I had an almost automatic reaction of rejection, expulsion, and comprehensive indigestibility of the contents. Trying to get closer to the material with a second reading felt risky.
A major theme of the book is hatred of the “other” and hatred of difference, which Freud characterised in Instincts and their Vicissitudes as follows:
At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects and what is hated are identical … The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are a source of unpleasurable feeling for it … Hate, as a relation to objects, is older than love. (Freud, 1915c, pp. 136-139)
Another major theme is that the external world is not given equal status to the internal world in psychoanalytic theory and practice:
At no point in this formative moment of our theory was the external world conceptualized as making demands of its own … which themselves might possess force and power equivalent to those demands originating in our bodies … (p. 4) [and] We want to be able to look to the external world as a primary source without having to—having to—think of that turn toward the outside as a primary turn away from the inside. (p. 7)
Among the external demands considered are murderous racism, homophobia, misogyny, global warming, the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, anti-Latino violence, mass immigration, and genocide. Strikingly, for a book edited by two psychoanalysts living and working in New York, there is scant mention of 9/11, perhaps because they did not consider it “contemporary” or perhaps because it is too close to home. “To be fully open to the world would mean to be unbearably open to its suffering, a suffering we are only rarely able to usefully manage” (p. 72).
Maybe one reason I found this book so deeply disturbing is that it is a direct challenge to psychoanalytic theory, a theory that co