Affect, Representation and Language by Howard B. Levine  Routledge, 2021;  155 pp

A recent photograph shows psychoanalyst Howard Levine descending a flight of stairs from the stacks of an upper floor of a library. Above and to the right, like the analyst's thought bubble, is a seemingly incongruous wall hanging: a cartoonish, marionette-like figure in profile on a unicycle, one uplifted hand precariously balancing an umbrella, backed by what appears to be a raincloud. Supposing the library setting to signify higher-level thought processes, the image is legible as a figure of the analyst attempting to sustain a reflective position impacted by disequilibrating forces. Does the cloud, with its somber gray tint, depict an unrepresented psychic state?

Over a half century of practice, Levine has developed a multilayered theoretical synthesis as presented in Affect, Representation and Language. Recognizing the insufficiency of theory and failure of classical technique in treating borderline and traumatized patients, the author integrates the work on that topic of Green, Winnicott, Bion, Scarfone, Ogden, and Alvarez, among others, along with that of the French psychosomatic school. Tellingly, Levine begins by tracing the origins of his own analytic formation, characterized as a “deeply personal journey” (p. 7), to a rupture in childhood experience, which he temporally situates with a precision reminiscent of Freud's construction of the primal scene in the Wolfman case (1955e/1918)1:

I was drawn to psychoanalysis, in part, because of a significant early emotional loss, one that left me feeling restless, incomplete, and in search of something. My maternal grandmother, to whom my mother was extremely close, died in the seventh month of my second year… I have developed a

1. The association pertains only to Freud's chronological precision, with no other developmental parallels intended between Levine and Freud's patient.

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strong conviction that this loss precipitated a significant depressive withdrawal on my mothe