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Dear Editor-in-Chief
The Letter to the Editor submitted by Tillotson, Winters and Harrang provides an opportunity for commentary about the complicated and confusing role of language in psychoanalysis. Their letter concerns a review by Michael Robbins of their book Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond published in IJP, 2022, Volume 103, Issue 6.
Tillotson, Winters and Harrang outline numerous objections to Robbins’ review, but a main area of concern has to do with the diagnostic characterization and language used to describe the patients and interventions portrayed in the book’s clinical vignettes, which the authors feel mischaracterizes the focus of the book. These objections, along with a few other points, are used to argue that Robbins has a “broad misunderstanding of the focus of the book” (1) or alternatively, a “misreading” (p. 2).
A book review constitutes the thoughts and responses of a reviewer to a book and may be different from the wished-for response from the reader. Robbins offers both an appreciation of and a disagreement with this book. He writes, “The authors are articulate, poetic, and very knowledgeable on the aspects of object relations theory about which they write” (1133). While he sees things differently from some of the authors, he offers his own theoretical rationales for his disagreements.
The letter does, however, evoke two interesting questions: (1) how does the lack of uniformity of language, specifically definitions and terminology, affect the interpretation and understanding of ideas in psychoanalysis, and (2) are there situations where the conceptualization of a diagnostic genre of patients – characterizing patients along certain trajectories such as self–other differentiation, capacity for linguistic symbolization and other definitions alluding to the general level of psychic primitiveness of the patient – stands in the way of seeing a different psychoanalytic idea, as the letter purports.