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When I was asked to review Owen Renik's essay on Ted Jacobs's The Use of the Self, the oddity of the request itself captured my interest. Dr Renik's essay appeared in a 1997 issue of the Psychoanalytic Inquiry along with five others inspired by Dr Jacobs's work. Why would JAP want a review of just one essay? Why that one and not the other five? And why not the book on which the essay was based? Rather than interpret this as a pathological state of contextual, if not editorial dissociation, I decided to stay within the boundaries assigned and consider the request per se and my interaction with it as a potential metaphor for this much inspired work. We will return to the implications of this decision later.
Dr Renik states that in his book, The Use of the Self, Ted Jacobs breaks new ground as a ‘clinical illustrator’ through his ‘rich, graceful, evocative accounts of an analyst's clinical experiences’. Dr Jacobs stands in the company of a line of psychoanalysts from the Freudian community, including Heimann (1950), Reich (1951), Money-Kyrle ,