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“I really love theory and hope that you will too!” (Newirth, The Unconscious: A Contemporary Introduction, 2023, p. 16). So concludes the effusive introduction to Joseph Newirth’s contribution to the “Routledge Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis” series on “The Unconscious,” a useful preparation for the joyful tour-de-force to follow on a topic some might find impenetrable and dull.
This Routledge series sees its task as creating “an encyclopedic enterprise of psychoanalysis,” and for that reason this volume is written to the uninitiated, or amateur of psychoanalysis (Govrin, n.d.). The text is ordered largely chronologically, from a first chapter on Freud’s elaborations of the unconscious through to Newirth’s synthesis of advances in theories of development and subjectivity in the past 25 years. Newirth does not attempt to be comprehensively inclusive in his history of the unconscious, holding true to the project of an encyclopedia from the Contemporary Psychoanalysis school. Therefore, one encounters throughout the text many references to Melanie Klein and Kleinians such as Wilfrid Bion; to Donald Winnicott, Heinz Kohut, and Edgar Levenson; to developmental theories from Daniel Stern, Peter Fonagy, and Beatrice Beebe; and no references from Anna Freud and few from American ego psychology, showing the author’s preference for “two-person” theories in psychoanalysis. Instead, Newirth describes Freud’s work on the ego and the unconscious in a way that would give an interested reader a clue as to where another path of theorizing might have followed, furthered by including several interpretations of Freud through the writings of American ego psychologist Sander Abend.
In the introductory section, Newirth describes clinical psychoanalysis techniques as necessarily rooted in one’s theory of the unconscious and as sharing “a primary belief in the centrality of the unconscious as the source of an analysand’s difficulty,” that is used to engage “the patient’s unconsci