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Like a pair of innovative travel agents who are determined to inject fresh life into a tiresomely stale historical Grand Tour of psychoanalysis by designing an offbeat but upbeat itinerary, Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips offer a 400-page, 25-essay whirlwind voyage through psychoanalytic literary studies from the earliest days to the present time. Natülich, we begin with an obligatory pilgrimage to fin de siècle Vienna—with ample quotations from the master's revolutionary opus on dreams. With almost equal predictability, the intellectual junket winds (or bogs) down in the Left Bank cafes of Saint Germain in the midst of pretentiously obscure chatter by France's two major modern magots, the Lacanians and the semiotic rhetoricians.
It is the places in between the worlds of 1890 and 1980 which give Kurzweil and Phillips's tour its charm and vitality—at least for a stodgy, card-carrying member of the American Psychoanalytic like myself. Such unexpected stopovers as Otto Rank's highly original views on the psychology of creativity and Erich Fromm's deft dissection of Kafka's Trial as though it were a dream are entirely new to me.
The tour also permits the psychoanalyst reader to mingle with the natives by providing excerpts from the other side of the intellectual ledger. We get to hear what working writers and academic "lit crits" think about analysis. Judging from the startingly fresh insights that W. H. Auden offers in his analysis of a dream of a morphinist, it might well prove useful for every psychoanalytic institute to have a poet in residence to co-teach its dream seminars. And nowhere is that old game of analyzing the analyst played with more finesse than in Steven Marcus's sharply reasoned study of Freud's literary style and clever use of suspenseful narrative techniques