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Chris Jaenicke has written his new book, whose interwoven themes are intersubjective systems theory in practice and the risk of relatedness. Although written in English and translated into German by Elizabeth Vorspohl, The Risk of Relatedness appeared first in Germany, Jaenicke's home for the past 20 years. The book thus illustrates the hermeneutic and intersubjective principle of the inescapability of one's actual situation, an inevitability to be welcomed and inhabited. But, this author's home was also New York, where I first heard him in 1983 or 1984 when he delivered an early paper called “Kohut's Concept of Cure.” This paper seemed to me so useful that I was always puzzled that its author seemed to have disappeared. When, in 1996, drawn together by the themes in my work, we began to correspond between Berlin and New York, a friendship began that illustrates very well the risk of relatedness. We see each other
once every three or four years, connecting in a manner that leaves us both bereaved by our distance.
The perceptive reader will already have rightly concluded that I do not have enough distance from this book or from its author to give it an objective review, were such a thing possible anyway. This book and, therefore, this review article, feel more like an ongoing conversation in which my collaborators—Robert Stolorow and George Atwood—and I are also participants. For one thing, Jaenicke has taken our work and made it user-friendly, experience-near, and yet challenging to common notions of psychoanalytic technique. I am reminded of the famous words of Juergen Habermas, who remarked that Hans-Georg Gadamer had urbanized the Heideggerian country-province. Similarly, Jaenicke presents intersubjective systems theory in a way that brings it down from the heights of generality into the lived experience of our everyday psychoanalytic practice. Arriving in our practices, the theory, as Jaenicke embodies it, encourages us to accept the emotional haz