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There are any number of psychoanalytic volumes that are impressive achievements in the exploration and development of metapsychological theory, or compendiums on clinical practice chock full of case illustrations, or more personally ascribed pieces that speak of the autobiographical influences in shaping the author’s psychoanalytic weltanschaung. Seldom, however, is there a volume that pulls together all of these elements and most importantly writes about them in plain English. Christina Kieffer’s newest volume Mutuality, Recognition, and the Self: Psychoanalytic Reflections (Kieffer, 2014) achieves all of this and more through sewing together a host of articles she has published over the past three decades.
The dimensions of depth and breadth of the volume are measured in terms of a rich evolution of psychoanalytic theory, admittedly biased in terms of the contemporary influences of self psychology and relational psychoanalysis. Because both have also been influenced by such theories as complexity theory (and its sister theories chaos and nonlinear dynamic systems theory), Kieffer covers these too, but most importantly she never loses sight of the psychoanalytic traditions, the shoulders upon which all contemporary psychoanalytic theory stands when one takes an evolutionary perspective regarding progressions in psychoanalytic thinking. In so doing, Kieffer’s volume is assiduously ecumenical and I would say fair, and that comes through whether one agrees with everything
she writes or not. What is clear is that she is writing a labor of love, in essence a kind of autobiographical piece that infuses the text with the rich theoretical discourse that inspires Kieffer’s view of contemporary psychoanalytic practice.
In her Prologue, one of the best that I have read, one immediately gets the sense of Kieffer as a mature psychoanalytic practitioner and theoretician. She invites the reader into the dialectics of both contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. The dial