The Personal Myth in Psychoanalytic Theory

Edited by Peter Hartocollis and Ian Davidson Graham. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press. 1991. Pp. xviii + 413.

Remembering the Personal Past: Descriptions of Autobiographical Memory. By Bruce M. Ross. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991. Pp. xii + 244.

It is a pleasure to review two such different books, both of which belong in every psychoanalyst's library and address issues at the heart of psychoanalytic discourse: how the past constitutes the personal present, and how the present personal organises itself by reference to its own past, inscribed and reinscribed at the margins of literality and figurativity. As I shall suggest, such matters also strike at the core of our resistances to psychoanalytic discourse by attesting to the instabilities of all self-knowledge and the impossibilities of epistemological unity or totalisation.

The Personal Myth in Psychoanalytic Theory is a substantial anthology resulting from the First Delphi International Psychoanalytic Symposium, cochaired by Peter Hartocollis and Ian Graham, which brought together 250 participants and over 30 extensive papers from a variety of psychoanalytic viewpoints (structural-functional, self-psychological, object-relational, post-Kleinian, and independent). This volume includes five major papers (by Jacob Arlow, Otto Kernberg, Donald Meltzer, André Green, and Ernest Wolf); ten other original papers, which are either commentative or elaborative (clinical and applied); a reprinting of Anna Potamianou's interesting 1985 paper; a syncretic discussion by Robert Wallerstein; as well as a preface, an introduction and an epilogue by the editors.

It was Graham's idea that the topic of 'personal myth' could serve as a 'bridging concept' around which diverse theoretical orientations could be related. This inspiration has proved to be both brilliant, in that this is a rewarding collection of papers, and quixotic, to the extent that the volume illustrates rather poignan