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Rebecca Colemann Curtis. Desire, self, mind, and the psychotherapies. Unifying psychological science and psychoanalysis. New York: Jason Aronson, 2008.
If one thinks how difficult the dialogue is between different schools, the aim of the book written by Rebecca Coleman Curtis, who is professor of psychology at Adelphi University, New York, and faculty at the W.A. White Institute, might sound too ambitious. Yet the attempt to establish an essential link with the new cognitive science, overcoming the many intermediate steps, is extremely rewarding: it operates as a simplifier of the too many controversies, which progressively familiarizes the reader with the prospected synthesis, making it more and more palatable. The confrontation with the data from scientific research enables both a process of deconstruction and a “reader-friendly” reconstruction of the theoretical framework. The result is a book pleasurable to read, and supported by data that are constantly elaborated and transformed into “meaning.”
The idea that the creation of meaning helps survival is the core assumption of this book, where psychoanalysis is portrayed as the continuation of the natural impulse to organize life by interpreting it. In this respect, the author follows the main contributors to the so-called “crisis of metapsychology”, such as G.S. Klein, who described psychoanalysis as a “psychology of meaning” (Klein, 1976, p. 54); Merton Gill, who made a similar claim (Gill, 1976, p. 85); Roy Schafer, who qualified meaning as “the center of psychoanalytic world” (Schafer, 1976, p. 100); and Robert Holt, who pointed out that Freud's work was dealing “always and almost exclusively with the patterns of meanings” (Holt, 1976, p. 178).
Why is “meaning” so important? Because of our mortality, or better, our awareness of death. Here, Rebecca Curtis oscillates between a biological and existential explanation: on the one hand, she suggests that the belief that “everything makes sense and can be understood” ha