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To paraphrase an old Chinese curse, psychoanalysis in the past half century has certainly lived through interesting times. Leo Rangell is uniquely positioned to provide what he describes as “a
direct observational history by a participant-observer of the second half of the psychoanalytic century” (p. 3). In My Life in Theory, an ambitious and at times poignantly elegiac retrospective of his life through the lens of theoretical developments (and vice versa), he functions as an eyewitness to, and interpreter of, the shifting winds in psychoanalysis over his lifetime.
Few others can claim the vantage point Rangell has had in the critically important development of our field in the postwar period. The breadth of change he has witnessed and participated in and the number of psychoanalytic luminaries he has known and worked with are indeed vast, and his book travels over an infinitely interesting terrain, one he has been privileged to witness more closely and more at length than many others. Having served twice as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association and twice as president of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Rangell has indeed been “at the vortex of the scientific and organizational issues throughout this period” (p. 3), and is able to offer an intriguing and irreplaceable perspective.
Rangell proves himself to be a highly engaging presenter of psychoanalytic history. At the center of important institutional schisms and conflicts and as a participant in fundamental theoretical and organizational debates, he witnessed events that he describes in a vivid, detailed, and intimate manner. We hear about his professional development and about relationships with colleagues, mentors, and teachers. There are charming details, such as his meeting with Jacob Arlow on the subway as they traveled to their analytic hours in the early 1940s, constituting “the first psychoanalytic study group I knew of” (p. 68). His description of the psychoanalytic scene i