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Words are the currency of psychoanalysis. In another context, D.Z. Phillips (Phillips 1991), the Welsh philosopher of Religion, wrote that: “the words in our lives, and the life in our words, reveal where, and who, we are.”
What are we to make then of the attempt, as here, to compare and contrast two quite distinct vocabularies—the Kleinian and the Lacanian? At times they can seem like two quite different forms of life, to use Wittgenstein’s radical phrase, creating different landscapes of psychoanalysis, two separate continents, speaking different languages to each other.
What does it mean for a truly realist vision of psychoanalysis to have two such different paradigms?—I think questions of this type are bound to emerge when reading this important and thought provoking collection of Essays.
These dialogues are “new,” in the sense that they follow on from a first British series, which involved some of the same authors, some 23 years ago, in 1994–1995. Can it really be so long ago? It seems to me that reading those, one gets the impression of a well-intentioned, but finally mutually frustrating, initial encounter. At times there is a sense of a psychoanalytic tug of war, each side trying to pull the other over to their side.
In the “new,” two decades later, second volume, the dialogues are again organised around a set of carefully chosen psychoanalytic themes. A helpful introduction to each chapter sets the scene, prepares the way, and summarises similarities and differences to come, before leading to a Kleinian and then a Lacanian perspective on that particular area.
Twenty years on, the contact between Kleinian and Lacanian practitioners feels less of a tug of war, more a laying out before the reader of a full (and very broad) spectrum of difference. The authors have clearly learnt from Guy Hall’s commentary in, and on, the first series. The contact and the debate is “older and wiser”:
Hall wrote in 1999 that:
The paradox is that there can be no dialogue until the m