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John Gedo occupies a unique position in contemporary psychoanalysis. After decades of psychoanalytic work, including teaching and supervising at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, he retired not to escape the burdens of the ‘impossible profession’ but to reflect and write about his experiences. A division of life into vita activa and vita contemplativa was highly praised in antiquity, but it is rare in psychoanalysis today. The bibliography in the book under review contains sixteen papers and eleven books by the author, most of them written after his official retirement. Fortunately for the reader not familiar with the author's previous writings, they are summarised and commented upon in the present book.
A sustained reflection such as Gedo had undertaken demonstrates that cases that failed, or those of limited success, tend to push their way into the foreground of the analyst's reflection. In the language of Gestalt psychology, failed cases, like interrupted tasks, leave a ‘Zygarnik effect’ on our memories. They highlight our personal limitations, but, even more painfully, the limitations of psychoanalysis itself. To reflect systematically as Gedo does on these cases is painful and avoided by most of us.
The title of the book contains its basic idea. The messages that the analysand sends to the analyst are encoded in a variety of languages. Success in treatment depends on the ability of therapist and patient to communicate simultaneously in several shared languages (p. 66). Therapeutic talent consists of the ability to use the widest variety of communicative modes in a flexible manner (p. 59). The analyst's language should be penetrating, concrete, simple, affect-laden and dramatic (p. 84). Since mental dispositions are formed early in childhood, they are more likely to be affected by metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. The blank language cultivated by American psychoanalysts during the Hartmann era was, in Gedo's view, counterproductive. Important fantasies