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 and the contributors of With Culture in Mind have put together a remarkable book that I believe marks an important moment in the history of psychoanalysis and in relational psychoanalysis in particular. It was conceived of collaboratively and carried out in comradeship-thereby embodying important values of the relational movement. The book is structured in a creative-and relational-manner: it is divided into three sections, each of which is made up of six brief clinical-theoretical studies. The six authors themselves have been in a writing group together for years, and the reader can hear their voices in one another's chapters. Above all, they are dedicated to the value relational theory places on context-the patient's, the analyst's, the analytic third, and the larger contexts of family, community, and world. They studied and applied to psychoanalytic practice the many streams of intellectual traditions that have influenced relational psychoanalysis, such as feminism, postmodernism, hermeneutics, critical theory, object relations theory, and interpersonal psychoanalysis. Dimen contributed a short commentary to each chapter, and three prominent analysts were invited to comment on one section apiece. So there is much mutual influence and many conversations going on. In other words, this book is saturated with relationality. It becomes immediately obvious that the collection is focused on the practice of a critical, historical, cultural, and political psychoanalysis. It will be recognized as one of the best examples of the explicit clinical application of the interpretive turn (e.g., Hiley, Bohman, & Shusterman, 1992) in psychoanalysis, something that the field of psychotherapy needs desperately and at which it usually fails.
For instance, the title is evocative and playful: “with culture in mind” could also be read as “with mind in culture.” And really, once readers have grasped that (no doubt) intentional play on words, a new idea might appear: the disti