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This is a very readable, highly informed book that unabashedly undertakes to cross-pollinate the ideas of widely differing (and opposing) schools of thought. Not the first attempt at comparing and contrasting Lacanian and self-psychological approaches (see, for example, the Franco-American dialogues in Feher Gurewich and Tort, 1996), this book has a definite pluralistic and polytheoretical agenda. Kirshner takes the reader on an enlightening tour of Lacanian ideas to see how these can be compared, contrasted, and spliced together with certain elements of American psychoanalysis (mainly Kohut, but also Modell and Bromberg, amongst others), and also with parts of Winnicott's thinking and the work of André Green. The book is written in a discursive style, managing to avoid the feel of a theoretical treatise despite the broad sweep of ideas under investigation. Kirshner is unusually able to interweave apparently incompatible views in a plain-spoken way, showing how the different positions may add up to a whole. Along the way, he quietly unveils some fresh and integrative perspectives and ideas of his own (regarding the nature of affect, for example, and specifying the function of the ego ideal). While the exchange between Lacanian theory and self-psychology is informative and illuminating, the book's real impetus lies in creatively expanding the theoretical envelope beyond these paradigms towards a new integration, although towards the end of the book Kirshner seems to draw back from more fully exploring his ideas on integrating (or reintegrating) affect and the body into Lacanian, as well as into self-psychological and intersubjective, approaches to clinical psychoanalysis.
By juxtaposing Lacan's emphatically continental conception of the subject with Anglo-Saxon conceptions of the self, Kirshner persuades us that these are not simply alternate theoretical conceptions, but that each compensates for something missing in the other. The language of the self suggests an int