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At a time in psychoanalytic history when serious thinkers wonder whether the theoretical lode which can still come from free associations may not be coming to an end, it is reassuring and refreshing to read these reflections of a psychoanalytic lifetime by Hans Loewald. Not only does Loewald still extract new and compelling ideas from the psychoanalytic process, but he does so with its most routine method and goal, the genetic historical reconstruction of the past. The exercise of thought through which he leads his reader reminds one that Freud also did not "discover"; he saw differently what was always there. Only a small amount of the profuse literature in the mental sciences continues to do this to a significant degree and in a helpful way. This is such a book.
The first of a new series, "The Freud Lectures at Yale," the book consists of three lectures: on man as moral agent, on transference and love, and on psychoanalysis and religious experience. Historicity and temporality are the themes which bind the three together. While each starts from a different point of origin, they all dip back to a common substrate: "To appropriate, to own up to, one's own history is the task of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic endeavor" (p. 20). The psychoanalytic process aims to develop the capacity in human beings to "appropriate" (the word is used a number of times and comes to have an affective meaning idiosyncratic to Loewald) their past, make it part of their living present, and use it effectively to direct their thrust into the future. Although it is said a bit differently here and is pithily true, this is hardly a new formulation of the psychoanalytic aim. Yet it is said with a grace and with a theoretical and therapeutic blend that imbues it with a distinct flavor and impact of its own. It is characteristic of Loewald's creative stamp that he can hold in his hand a ubiquitous truth, turn it around for us in his mind's eye, and have us see a new plane, or facet, or