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If psychoanalysis is a mixture of art and science, poetry alone cannot take the measure of it, it seems. This book is an example of how an author with a fine literary flair lets most of psychoanalysis slip through his fingers even as he attempts to hold it with the most poetic hands.
The title is ambitious: Empathic Imagination. Either topic would seem to have required its own explication and yet the author has chosen to merge them adjectivally rather than dissect them singularly. Herein lies one of the weaknesses of this book: the author does not follow Coleridge's advice to the psychological investigator to "desynonymise"—get beyond the symbiotic community of words to approach the clarity of a single individuated idea. This advice, though impossible to follow, is in keeping with sound scientific principles that attempt to isolate components at first, the better to understand their complexities later. Nothing is taken for granted in science: every phenomenon has to be born again, so to speak, in the test tube or crucible before it can claim its scientific birthright.
Margulies begins his book with a comparison of psychoanalysis