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.
A brief review of this book is no easy task given the conceptual density that characterizes Szpilka’s body of work. I was recently given the opportunity to introduce and discuss several of his works, in addition to reviewing his biography and collected works. This, alongside the long history of our relationship, places me in a position to make some broad stroke observations in regard to locating this text within his wider thought.
Shortly after writing a beautiful and profound collection of short stories, La Tzibeles (2013), which reveals several autobiographical details, Szpilka wished to return to an earlier work (Believing in the Unconscious).
Perhaps the book of short stories may be considered an attempt to explore the fantasmatic dimensions of his own identity and, by way of a self-analysis, to find another way to explore certain original themes in greater depth; original in the dual sense of the origin of human reason, and the origin of himself as a person. La Tzibeles reflects a sophisticated humour and a subtle characterization of the vicissitudes of the life of the protagonist, seldom found in literature written by psychoanalysts. In fact, this is a portrayal of the innermost workings of the author’s own personality. In essence the stories boil down to this: the things that are seemingly most consistent in a person’s life turn out to reveal their inconsistency in manifold, humorous and ingenious ways, leading us to the conclusion that one should in fact “believe in the unconscious”. This is a theme that has clearly been developed over various books and articles, but it is here, in this book, which forms the subject of my review, that it is explored in the greatest depth.
If we consider these other works as a counterpart to the book of short stories and his present work, the vivid nature of the inexistence of an identity – which Szpilka describes in La Tzibeles as an “ornament of nothingness”– is arguably revisited in this text with greater erudition and depth