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Illusion, Disillusion, and Irony in Psychoanalysis is a collection of John Steiner’s papers published over the past seven years, all of which share a central concern with the fundamental role of illusion in human life and the important developmental (and psychoanalytic) task of progressively facing reality through a process of disillusionment. While the interplay of illusion and disillusion is by no means a new concern in psychoanalysis, Steiner’s project over the past decade has been to illuminate its role in the human condition more broadly. As such, his book transcends the usual parameters of psychoanalytic writings, and might better be thought of as a book of psychoanalytically informed wisdom, distilled from Steiner’s many years of immersion in clinical work and theoretical elaboration of the modern Kleinian paradigm. It is a work that
takes up a view of human life that is at once deeper and more universal than one typically encounters in psychoanalytic writings.
In part, this feature of Steiner’s late work is related to the fact that he has been retired from clinical practice throughout the course of these writings, and, as he explains in the introduction, this fact has led him to rely mainly on examples from classical literature and poetry to elucidate his ideas rather than draw solely on clinical vignettes (although the latter do also appear occasionally throughout this volume). The altered viewpoint entailed by this change in subject matter is paralleled by, and perhaps necessitates, a shift of focus from the particulars of psychopathology to the universal travails of human experience. The experience of reading these chapters is as clinically revelatory as the best psychoanalytic writings, illuminating moments in the consulting room and distilling aspects of transference and countertransference, etc. But it is equally revelatory of central aspects of the reader’s own life, including marriage, parenting, professional growth and setbacks, and es