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.
This volume is actually several books rolled into one. That makes it difficult to read, and difficult to review. The author tells us at one point, ‘In this chapter I have meandered …’ (p. 117), and at another that the creation of the book involved ‘bewildering’ difficulties (page ix). ‘Meandering’ and ‘bewildering’ are terms which might be applied to the experience of reading this work, taken in its entirety. At times I felt as if I were lost in a maze. Yet that perspective alone does not do justice to this text, which is at once a book by a sensitive clinician about a perplexing clinical problem; a book demonstrating the use of applied analysis to examine a psychoanalytic question best viewed through a prism which reaches beyond the examination of an analysand in the consulting room; the work of a trained clinician, anthropologist, historian and literary scholar; and a challenging discourse on philosophy, theology, literature, the visual and dramatic arts, and psychoanalytic history and theory. Later, taking all this into account, I will offer some suggestions about who might benefit from reading this book, and how that would-be reader might go about it.