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The dialogic structure of human encounters has found expression as a literary genre since antiquity, as Plato's “Dialogues” testify. For what use? one might ask, applying a Winnicottian methodology of inquiry, as suggested by Adam Philips. To midwife latent ideas and bring them into a sharper conscious focus might be Michael Eigen's answer The maieutic mode has indeed an ancient progeny too, going back to Socrates who, in identification with his mother, purported to midwife minds, if he could not help bodies to give birth. Molino prefers “conversation”, alluding to a metaphorical intercourse which generates knowledge and meaning.
The five psychoanalysts interviewed by Anthony Molino show the reader diverse ways of generating knowledge about themselves and their theories in this work whose internal coherence is provided by the author's mind and sensitive but transformational questions.
As the book title states, the interviewees are freely associating; they are unique individuals who use the psychoanalytic method in their own idiosyncratic ways. I would go as far as suggesting that they are apostates. However their common ground is a sort of intellectual diffidence coupled with a critique of any form of authoritarian, apodictic and dogmatic interpretation of psychoanalysis and the shifting of the emphasis onto the primacy of experience. Each interview is preceded by an impressionistic sketch by Molino, who, in so doing, recreates for the reader the ambience in which the dialogue takes place.
The first character the reader encounters is Christopher Bollas, who shows his mind at work, making use of the psychic objects of his “treasure chest”. The interviewer's questions also assume the status of psychic objects, provoking an eruption of pleasure, as when Molino asks:
“Psychoanalysis seems to oscillate between the free associative dimension you've emphasised and what you are now identifying as the pleasure of the narrative. Still, I've found that a sense of history is missin