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I must confess, when I began reading Irwin Hoffman's book, Ritual and Spontaneity in the Psychoanalytic Process, I immediately became exhausted and had to fight the urge to put down this text and take a nap. But please continue to read this review (as I continued to read Hoffman), as I came to feel that my initial reaction, though informative, was ultimately unfair.
Hoffman throws his hat into the postmodern ring of psychoanalytic discourse. I realize I am not using the words that Hoffman would prefer here, and words are clearly important to him. This is what I initially found exhausting. It is undeniable that words (including our psychoanalytic nomenclature) are not just reflective, but constitutive of how we shape and experience reality. However, at first blush, Hoffman seems to be joining the parade of theorists who deconstruct the poor design of previous “isms” only to construct a few more of their own. Perhaps a major pitfall of any revisionist (1) theory (and I will not beleaguer the reader with more “isms”) is the emphasis on differentiation, an adolescent need to assert how our theories are different from the paternal specter of classical theory. This may be an inevitable developmental stage for emerging ideas, much as adolescence, and the processes of differentiation, are necessary for emergence into adulthood.
In my opinion, Hoffman brings a new sense of mature, articulated identity into the revisionist psychoanalytic discourse. His theory is both inclusive and expansive; his painstaking definition of terms does not seem to be in the service of partisanship, but instead seems to represent a creative and intellectually skillful attempt to plumb below the surface of some of the most contentious issues in modern psychoanalytic discourse.