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That five of the nine chapters in this book comprise previously published articles (three of them in the IJP), written over the course of a decade and encompassing a range of clinical and theoretical themes, might give the impression that it is a collection of papers. While this is not strictly wrong, it misses its remarkable consistency of vision and sensibility, the intricate articulation of component parts that make it very much a book.
Reis’s book is hospitable to a richly diverse range of analytic traditions - Anglophone and French especially, but also South American writers, all interests which build on his deep grounding in Freud. But as Christopher Bollas observes in a preface as brief as it is exact, Reis mercifully avoids the dutifully plodding “review of the literature”. While his psychoanalytic erudition is beyond doubt, the links he makes across different lines of thought are more associative than exhaustive, an “inspiring salon” (Bollas’s phrase) rather than a long and static register of names.
Reis’s prose is stately, careful, discrete. The book is notable for its engagement with academic as well as clinical psychoanalytic literature (two bodies of writing that speak to one another too rarely) and his formal diction can call to mind, at least at first, the signature style of the academic humanities. But this high style also facilitates the emergence, at key points, and especially in the clinical discussions, of a more distinctly personal voice.
Perhaps the most memorable instance here is a remark regarding his countertransference response to Sylvie, a perfumier (or “nose”) and drinks consultant, whom he discusses in his final chapter: “It may help to know that cocktails are on the short list of things that delight me" (108). That one modest adjective “short”, at once world-weary (reading it, I had my own
reflexive association to Hamlet’s “Man delights not me”) and nicely self-deprecating, left me feeling Reis had said both very little and a lot about