You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Richard Wollheim is the most psychoanalytically-informed philosopher of our time—in both senses of the word ‘informed’. A long-time honorary member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and for thirty-four years a member of the Department of Philosophy of University College, London, over twenty of them as its Professor, Wollheim's personal association with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thought goes back to the seminal figures of British psychoanalysis such as Melanie Klein. As Hanna Segal puts it in her contribution to the volume before us: ‘Wollheim is unique among philosophers in his profound knowledge and understanding of psychoanalysts, which includes the most recent developments’ (p. 55).
By recent developments, I expect Segal has Kleinianism in mind; as becomes clear in his monumental 1984 philosophical/psychoanalytic model of the human person, The Thread of Life, Wollheim's thought is deeply Kleinian. All aspects of his model show Klein's influence. Indeed, The Thread of Life is the first comprehensive model of the mind from a Kleinian point of view.
Hopkins & Savile do Wollheim proud in this handsome Festschrift of twenty papers. Though they deny it, the collection is almost as interesting and varied as Wollheim's own work (it does not, however, go back as far; Wollheim first published in 1950!). The papers are divided into four sections: psychoanalysis, values, and politics (strange bedfellows!); Bradley and Green (Wollheim has a strong interest in the history of philosophy): art and vision (Wollheim is a sensitive student of painting and seeing paintings); memory and motive.
The first section opens with an important paper by J. Hopkins and includes papers by S. Gardner on emotion, Segal on phantasy, M. Cavell on knowing and valuing, S. Scheffler on moral naturalism, A. W. Price on projection, M. Dent on aggression and Rousseau, G. A. Cohen on himself (a paper to which I will return), and A. Rorty and M. F. Burnyeat on lessons to be learned from Plato;