Love Actually: Steven Groarke, The Feeling Intellect: An Essay on the Independent Tradition in British and American Psychoanalysis (London and New York:  Routledge, 2022;  218 pp.)

The title page of The Maximus Poems by late-modernist American poet Charles Olson bears an obscure glyph (Figure 1). Apparently derived from a fragment of perforated tin ceiling, in silhouette it is meant to look like a paleo-artefact, a rugged cipher of an advancing human figure, and comes to stand for the principle of human life in motion - the ‘Figure of Outward’, or whatever it is that makes humans human by setting them journeying towards and beyond their own horizons. Olson's design springs to mind as a way into Steven Groarke's challenging book on the Independent tradition in Anglo-American psychoanalysis for a number of reasons, one of which might be his attempt to place that tradition - or what he names the ‘confluent developments’ of the Independent tradition and British object relations theory - within broad geographic and intelectual parameters, as something not parochial to post-war Britain but straddling the Western hemisphere. Another might be the attempt to address psychoanalysis in terms of a set of new first principles, in part informed by phenomenological views of embodiment and temporality (but including post-war respondents such as Derrida, Levinas and Ricoeur). But what most brings the Olsonian ‘Figure of Outward’ to mind is the idea that suffuses Groarke's book, which he frequently names ‘the reach for life’ or the ‘pressure for more life’ - a vitalism detached from biology to become the fulcrum of an existential humanist vision.

Groarke's book, though not an isolated phenomenon - there is, no doubt, increasing transatlantic uptake of Winnicottian concepts, and the philosophical framing of object relations has an important presence in the American relational