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Buster Keaton? Bob Newhart? Garrison Keillor? That's who occurred to me when Ted Jacobs reveals that as a youth he dreamed of becoming a comic. He understands this wish as inspired by his father, a man who, in spite of being private about personal matters, was an inveterate storyteller and for whom “invented history was his specialty” (p. 3). In this description, which mixes the admiring awe of the child with the muffled criticism of someone who's been duped, we begin to appreciate the complex character of this analyst. Like those comedians, Jacobs is a modest and gentle man. He cautions us on the first page that this is “just one man's point of view and as such it contains all the limitations, biases, and misperceptions that inevitably become incorporated into a perspective that is highly subjective” (pp. 1–2). But behind the modesty, which he usually reserves for discussions of theory, are strong and persuasive opinions when it comes to clinical work.
The overarching theme of this collection is unconscious communication and how the analyst can access it clinically. He was trained as a classical analyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and his roots in
that bastion of tradition never feel far away, but Jacobs has always operated at the progressive fringes of classical technique, rubbing elbows with approaches that emphasize the importance of the analyst's subjectivity and countertransference, and establishing himself as one of this country's leading contributors to the topics of enactments and self-disclosure. Field theory and contemporary Bionian theory, which he seems close to at times, is not something he discusses. Along with writers like Poland, Boesky, Chused, and McLaughlin, Jacobs is considered an “interactionist,” the term that seems to be used most often for those who moved to an intersubjective perspective from classical origins. This makes him a superb translator between one- and two-person models, as well as a compelling advocate for the va