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Any text or work can be read in many different ways. Different readers meet different writers in a text. Similar to writing, reading may be considered to a great extent as autobiographical. Although we like to think of the reality of the text regardless of the reader, we can never be certain that we are not reading our own thoughts into someone else's words. Having said all of this, I find On the Freud Watch an outstanding piece of work. It is a pleasure trip through personally selected psychiatric and psychoanalytic scenes. It is a trip of recovery—re-finding—rather than of discovery or finding. Even if one does not recall being in those affective spaces, one gets a feeling of déjà vu.
I could talk all about the content of the book, which consists of 13 lively chapters and an intimately elegant personal epilogue. Yet, I find the process of the way the book unfolds even more fascinating. I find the book to proceed like a mini-analysis in 14 sessions. It is a mini-analysis based on the hope of bringing closure to some nagging unfinished business in the past. A nagging business may never be finished in a time-limited analysis, but nevertheless Paul Roazen walks out of the book content and serene. (Paul Roazen read an early draft of this review before his death on November 3, 2005.) The original analysis had been entered into for the sake of discovering the ultimate scandalous secret of an important historical object, Sigmund Freud. Since the ultimate scandalous secret—similar to Lacanian desire—can never be discovered, we go through life discovering smaller secrets which are momentarily