Chapter 1 Some Thoughts on How to Read this Book

This volume is the product of more than a decade of writing my experience of reading major works by Freud, Fairbairn, Isaacs, Winnicott, Loewald, Bion, and Searles. I attempt not to write about my experience of reading their works, but to write my experience of reading them: to write what I have let these papers and books do to me, what I have done with these papers and books, and how I have rewritten them and made them my own books and papers. I try to capture in my writing something of the way I read in order that the reader may learn something about the way he reads, including the way he reads his own writing. This volume is “a reading book” – a book about reading, about how to read – not simply a book of readings.

When I am talking about a book that is important to me, I often slip and say, “the book I wrote,” instead of, “the book I read,” and then correct myself. I’ve heard others regularly make the same slip. I attribute the error to the fact that when we have spent a good deal of time with a book, we feel that we have written it or at least rewritten it – and, in an important sense, we have. Reading is an experience in which we do not simply “take in” the meaning of the text. In the act of reading, we transform the black markings on the page into linguistic structures that hold significance. But when we are reading creatively, we do something more than that. We each produce our own personal set of meanings and ideas using the text as a starting point: “Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find” (Emerson, 1841, p. 87). I think of this way of

reading – more accurately, this aspect of reading – as “transitive reading,” a reading experience in which we are actively doing something to the text, making it our own, interpreting in a way that adds something to the text that had not been there before we have read it.

It is also important to be able to read “intransitively” – that is, to be able