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Simply put, Yehoyakim Stein's project is to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis. Stein wants to reveal our blind spots—our conceptual lacunae, as he calls them—not merely as a historical exercise, but also to induce change in our field. Stein's underlying question is a fascinating one: why do we think about some human concerns in psychoanalysis and not others? He argues—and, I think, persua-sively—that unless we analyze our blind spots, we will be stymied in our theoretical development. He also has some interesting ideas about how we can do this.
In Part I, “Locating the Irrational, Understanding the Repressed,” Stein looks at the development of scientific ideas through the lens of psychoanalysis, which includes the unconscious drives and the cognitive unconscious. He reads texts hermeneutically—that is, he reads between the lines to find irrational elements that can be thought about psychoanalytically. Stein argues that the epistemo-logical split between the objective and the subjective is hindering our creativity. He is skeptical of the current zeal for evidence-based methodology, which carries the unexamined mantle of a claim to