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.
I love the international Webinars put on by various analytic organizations because they introduce me—albeit at a distance—to people I would otherwise never meet. I am thinking of people like Paul Renn. Long before reading Renn's (2012) important and masterful book, The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma and Representation in Psychotherapy, I was aware of a polite and seemingly compassionate English participant on many International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy Webinars named Paul Renn. His was a voice that often made me scratch my head wondering, “Who is this guy who knows so damn much? Where did he get such inexhaustible curiosity about and encyclopedic knowledge of the analytic literature?”
It turns out that Paul Renn not only knows the intellectual sweep of the psychoanalytic world—and a fair amount of psychological research findings, philosophy, and cognitive and neuroscience to boot—but he is also a wonderful writer and a seasoned, sensitive clinician. His is the sensibility of a polymath, who seeks to integrate as seamlessly as possible vast learning across many fields. It is a sensibility that dissolves many conflicts that have energized the relational world in the United States; conflicts between ideas in American relational theory, contemporary self psychology, interpersonal theory, and intersubjective complexity thinking. For example, Renn does not rehash arguments about which theoretical discourse is too self-effacing and which too “out there,” which too Cartesian, and which insufficiently focused on the intrapsychic, which too concerned with sameness, and which overemphasizing difference. He abandons these old—and, to me, somewhat worn and tiresome—parochial conflicts in favor of presenting a contemporary psychoanalysis that emerges from and is part of postmodern intellectual life. All this is apparent in his new book (Renn, 2012).
As Judy Guss Teicholz writes in her foreword to the book (a masterful int