You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Muriel Dimen has edited a collection of case discussions entitled With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories. DIVISION/Review invited four contributors to comment on the book, independently of one another. The result follows: Four Views on With Culture in Mind
With Culture in Mind: Psychoanalytic Stories takes up the “constructed” nature of human identity through a series of “psychoanalytic stories,” culled from the practices of several analysts. Each essay is briefly introduced by editor Muriel Dimen and then discussed through general commentaries by Jessica Benjamin, Susie Orbach, and Andrew Samuels. Taken together, these essays and the reflections they generate draw much-needed attention to the place and power of culture within the psychoanalytic situation.
In her introduction, Dimen explains the origins of the volume in a psychoanalytic writing group whose one rule of interaction was to listen, empathize, and foster the voice and vision of each member. Emerging from this discipline, fortuitously, was a common intersection of interest. “From the members' diversity grew a mutually agreeable form: essays locating the psychic and the social in a single clinical moment” (p. 2). Indeed, this volume coherently and communally aims “to offer a new way of talking about the analyst's struggle to grasp the patient's internal life as voiced in relation to others in their political, social, and material contexts” (p. 3). This triad of contexts comes alive through the riveting, sometimes radical, snapshots of analysts who work, precisely, with “culture in mind.”
As one would expect, Dimen and her contributors demonstrate facility with prominent cultural and psychoanalytic icons such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser, as well as contemporary theorists such as Jessica Benjamin and Judith Butler. What is unexpected, and most welcome, is how the contributors, by and large, demonstrate the clinical utility of these theorists. Concepts like “interpellation,” in w