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Scarcely a week goes by without a book appearing that questions the validity of psychoanalysis, or comments on its impact. Therefore, a book that casts a fresh eye on the spectrum of our culture: art, the comics, literature, the cinema, music, and the holocaust, can only leave the reader with a renewed appreciation of the psychoanalytic concepts and understanding that allow Dr. Handler-Spitz to use her creative perceptions. Drawing from the work of Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Klein, the author meets the subject, (Magritte, for example), and a relationship develops between them that brings in the reader as a collaborative partner in an exploration of Magritte's paintings and life history. Instead of fitting Magritte into one or more “disorders” (such as a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the suicide of his mother and his viewing her partially naked body taken from the river), the author is able to do with language what Magritte accomplished with his art, bringing the viewer into an emotional landscape where artist, author, and reader can all join hands, look at each other, and feel the uncanny, the humor, and the dread that the artist portrays.
André Green (1986), in his work on Winnicott's contributions, anticipates Dr. Handler-Spitz' method with the reader when he writes, “the emptiness of negative narcissism, which leads to psychic death, is modified by transforming delusion into play, and death into absence, through the playground of potential space … perhaps analysis only aims at the patient's capacity to be alone (in the presence of the analyst), but also in a solitude peopled by play.”
The philosopher, Adolf Grunbaum (1993), has assailed the verity and scientific validity of psychoanalysis on philosophical grounds. Nonclinicians appear to have an easy time doing this. Dr. Handler-Spitz, who is also a trained philosopher, can bring out philosophical concepts and combine them with psychoanalysis. This is delightfully done in her essays on the