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Edith Weigert, M.D.: The Courage to Love: Selected Papers of … New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970. 421 pages, $15.
AS LONG AS there are Edith Weigerts living, teaching, and writing, psychoanalysis cannot die. Throughout these twenty-three selected papers, the same way she gives the human condition priority over psychopathology, she commits herself to being a human being before being a psychoanalyst.
It is therefore no accident that the first group of papers in this welcomed volume is subtitled, "Facing the Human Condition." Many of her other papers also could be included under this heading. Since the human condition involves life, love, death, human vulnerability, powerlessness, loneliness, and creativity, her trenchant discussions of psychoanalytic dynamics include copious references to those aspects of human existence. People, including analysts, are never static; they oscillate dynamically between polarities, such as the transferential and non-transferential aspects of a relationship.
What keeps Weigert's discussions of psychoanalysis full of vitality is her frank love affair with philosophy, unlike Freud's attitude toward it. "Psychoanalysts look at individual trees, philosophers at the whole woods, " she writes (p. xix). Thus she values philosophy's contribution in these words: "Scientific specialties which lose their philosophic moorings are likely to become scientific techniques" (p. 358).
As one might expect, Weigert believes that the study of values