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This is not a cozy armchair book. The title alerts you to expect personal subjective passions, bitterness, and anger, in addition to joyful satisfaction. Gedo describes this venture as an analytic memoir, an overview of his emotional and intellectual odyssey within the profession, principally centered on his subjective reactions to various people and events.
The emotional intensity of the account focuses on his complex interaction with Heinz Kohut, We are told in the middle of the book that defamatory misrepresentations of his (Gedo's) actions at a time when he broke with Kohut gave a strong impetus to his plan to write these memoirs and to spell out the full complexity of the personal issues that fueled the events. That may have been the impetus, but the book conveys more. The intensity of his interaction with Kohut is not only related to their interpersonal dynamics, but is highly enmeshed with Gedo's own intellectual journey, his own grappling and psychoanalytic theories, from which he emerged with outstanding contributions. The fact, however, that the focus of the book is on spleen and nostalgia limits his presentation of his intellectual journey to a chronology of events and mere summaries of his ideas and publications. For the full appreciation of his ideas, we have to turn to Gedo's prolific creative output, which includes 17 books and innumerable chapters and articles. This disproportion of emphasis on spleen, rather than on conceptual activity, skews the perspective of the book. It favors the interpersonal events over the passions of creative production, even when, as I suspect, it is the passions of creative thought that fueled the intensity of the interpersonal tension and strife.
Thus the book lends itself to being dismissed as a personal diatribe and to missing the larger story. The story is larger. Gedo's conceptual grappling concerns the fundamentals of psychoanalytic theory and technique. He analyzes their flaws, searches for and finds answers. He deep